Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement. Second, horror offers ways in which the experience of grief can be (...) contained and regulated and, in doing so, may offer psychological benefits for the bereaved. While our focus will be squarely on film, much of what we say applies to other media. (shrink)

Are horror films immoral? Gianluca Di Muzio argues that horror films of a certain kind are immoral because they undermine the reactive attitudes that are responsible for human agents being disposed to respond compassionately to instances of victimization. I begin with this argument as one instance of what I call the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA), and I argue that Di Muzio’s attempt to identify what is morally suspect about horror films must be revised to provide the most persuasive interpretation (...) of the ARA. I then argue that the ARA provides a compelling standard for evaluating the moral permissibility of creating and viewing horror films, yet I note that it is an exceedingly difficult practical task evaluating the risk that these films create for our reactive attitudes. My conclusion is that the ARA provides a useful way or orienting ourselves to the complicated details of evaluating the moral status of horror films. (shrink)

Horror is a popular genre or style in many different forms of art. In this essay I propose a definition of horror that is meant to capture our intuitions about the extension of this category over a variety of forms of art. In particular, I claim that horror is individuated by a specific atmosphere and mood, rather than by any singular entity in the horror representation.

Emmanuel Levinas is often thought of as a philosopher of ethics, above all else. Indeed, his notions of the face, the Other, and alterity have all earned him a distinguished place in the history of phenomenology as a fundamental thinker of ethics as a first philosophy. But what has been overlooked in this attention on ethics is the early work of Levinas, which reveals him less a philosopher of the Other and more as a philosopher of elemental and anonymous being, (...) a speculative metaphysician whose ethical voice was still in the process of forming. In this paper, I explore the early Levinas, specifically with an aim of assessing what he can tell us about phenomenology in its relation to the non-human world. I make two claims. One, Levinas’s idea of the “il y a” (the there is) offers us a novel way of rethinking the relation between the body and the world. This idea can be approached by phrasing Levinas as a materialist. Two, the experience of horror, which Levinas will place great onus on, provides us with a phenomenology at the threshold of experience. As I argue, it is precisely through what Levinas terms “the horror of the night,” that phenomenology begins to exceed its methodological constraints in accounting for a plane of elemental existence beyond experience. (shrink)

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

I argue that a solution to the paradox of horror should accommodate the possibility of enjoying an aesthetic experience partly in virtue of its being painful. This possibility is typically thought to be ruled out by the very nature of pleasure and pain. I argue that this is not so for adverbial accounts of pleasure. Using Aristotle's theory of pleasure as an example of an adverbial account, I show that it is possible for to enjoy an aesthetic experience partly in (...) virtue of its being painful. (shrink)

The article starts from Gilles Deleuze’s assumption of film being a philosophy in its own right and applies it to the horror genre. It reads Stanley Cavell’s concept of genre, Timothy Jay Walker’s work on the Horror of the Other (1) and Eugene Thacker’s understanding of philosophical horror (2). It researches horror film as philosophically relevant access to nothingness (3) and shifts to the operations of assigning places to nothingness according to its respective place of access (off screen, on screen, (...) behind the screen/behind the camera) (4). It then gives short analyses of Midsommar (5), Hereditary (6), Tarantula (7), and The Conjuring (8). In Tarantula, the screen functions as a shield against the agent of nothingness residing behind it. Once surmounted from behind by nothingness, the screen is finally purged. In Hereditary and Midsommar, nothingness is always already here, in full light, constantly transforming everything into nothing. In The Conjuring, the morphings and vectorial movements have nothingness evaporate from the screen to what lies behind it, namely (digital) picture technology. The screen turns into a membrane between nothingness and its condition, technology. As a consequence, we have to switch from philosophical horror to technological horror as access to nothingness (9). (shrink)

Der Beitrag untersucht die Langeweile auf klinischem Terrain und als literarisches/philosophisches Sujet in Abgrenzung zu benachbarten Phänomenen wie Muße, Müßiggang und Faulheit. Da sich das Phänomen Langeweile im Bedeutungsspektrum zwischen »horror vacui« (Kant) und »Windstille der Seele« (Nietzsche) einer definitorischen Klarheit entzieht, schlägt die Autorin anhand klinischer Vignetten vor, drei Qualitäten und regulierende Funktionen der Langweile zu differenzieren: eine vernichtende, mit »Desobjektalisierung« (Green) einhergehende Langeweile, eine als Abwehr eines traumabedingten Ich-Verlusts fungierende Langeweile sowie eine Langeweile als kreativer Übergangsraum. Freuds Gedanken (...) über die Existenz von »lustvolle(n) Spannungen und unlustige(n) Entspannungen« enthalten eine triebökonomische Perspektive, die einen Blick auf sehr unterschiedliche Lust- und Unlustqualitäten der Langeweile erlaubt. (shrink)

In all the Alien films, the environments are gloomy settings originally inspired by Gothic architecture, but it's the creature design, which leaves the most profound mark on us. The interaction between these art‐horror monsters and the sterileturned‐ grotesque environments of the Alien films can produce disgust or revulsion in the viewer. In Alien a fair amount of time is spent on the relationships between the crew members. One of the most horrific moments of the series is the cry of “kill (...) me” that emerges from the half‐conscious hosts as the space Marines explore the former colony of Hadley's Hope. Central to Carroll's theory on art‐horror is revulsion at the suggestion of physical contact with the fusion‐figures. At the end of Alien: Resurrection, Ripley lies in the middle of the Queen's huge mass. It is the most striking image in an otherwise cartoonish film. (shrink)

This article aims to provide an explication of a new conceptualisation of God's defeat of horrors (i.e., horror-defeat), and a successful solution to the Problem of Horrors—which we can term the ‘Reconciliation Account’. This specific conceptualisation will be formulated in light of the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, with an original extension of her work being made by utilising the work of Richard Swinburne and Robin Collins (amongst others), which, in combination, will provide us with a more robust (...) solution to the issue raised by horrors. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘hardcore’ horror films, and the discursive context in which mainstream horror releases are being dubbed ‘extreme’. This chapter compares ‘mainstream’ and ‘hardcore’ horror with the aim of investigating what ‘extremity’ means. I will begin by outlining what ‘hardcore’ horror is, and how it differs from mainstream horror (both in terms of content and distribution). I will then dissect what ‘extremity’ means in this context, delineating problems with established critical discourses about ‘extreme’ horror. Print press (...) reviewers focus on theatrically released horror films, ignoring microbudget direct-to-video horror. As such, their adjudications about ‘extremity’ in horror begin from a limited base that misrepresents the genre. Moreover, ‘extremity’ is not a universally shared value, yet it is predominantly presented as if referring to an objective, universally agreed-upon standard. Such judgements change over time. Moreover, in contrast to marketers’ uses of ‘extreme’, press critics predominantly use the term as a pejorative. Although academics have sought to defend and contextualise particular maligned films and directors, scholars have focused on a handful of infamous examples. As I will explain, academic publishers implicitly support that narrow focus. As such, the cumulative body of scholarly work on ‘extreme’ horror inadvertently replicates print press critics’ mischaracterisation of the genre. These discursive factors limit our collective understandings of ‘horror’, its ostensible ‘extremity’. and of ‘extremity’ qua concept. Given that the discourse of ‘extremity’ is so commonly employed when censuring representations that challenge established genre conventions, it is imperative that horror studies academics attend to peripheral hardcore horror texts, and seek to develop more robust conceptual understandings of extremity. (shrink)

An analysis of Japanese horror films from the 1990s and 2000s using Deleuzian concepts.

Where do a child’s morals come from? Interactions with other human beings provide arguably the primary contexts for moral development: family, friends, teachers and other people. It is the artistic products of human activity that this essay considers: literature, film, art, music. Specifically, I will consider some philosophical issues concerning the influence of folk and fairy tales on moral development. I will discuss issues of representation and reduction: in particular, how far should stories for children elide the complexities inherent to (...) many folk and fairy tales? Drawing on a distinction between a problematic reductionism and an appropriate pedagogical reduction, I suggest that pedagogical issues of representation require us to think about how to represent complexity in ways that are reductive without being reductionist, that can delight and engage without being horrifying or tedious. While there is a place for horror and for boredom, it is primarily a matter of timing... (shrink)

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

This book examines spectral haunting through the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida. Arguing that moral obligation can appear terrifying to the complacent self, the text interrogates ethical responsibility in contemporary horror genres.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the (...) perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having (...) their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified? (shrink)

For over a century, philosophers have argued that philosophy is impossible or useless, or both. Although the basic notion dates back to the days of Socrates, there is still heated disagreement about the nature of truth, reality, knowledge, the good, and God. This may make little practical difference to our lives, but it leaves us with a feeling of radical uncertainty, a feeling described by Kolakowski as "metaphysical horror." "The horror is this," he says, "if nothing truly exists except the (...) Absolute, the Absolute is nothing; if nothing truly exists except myself, I am nothing." The aim of this book, for Kolakowski, is finding a way out of this seeming dead end. In a trenchant analysis that serves as an introduction to nearly all of Western philosophy, Kolakowski confronts these dilemmas head on through examinations of several prominent philosophers including Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl, and many of the Neo-Platonists. He finds that philosophy may not provide definitive answers to the fundamental questions, yet the quest itself transforms our lives. It may undermine most of our certainties, yet it still leaves room for our spiritual yearnings and religious beliefs. The final sentence of the book captures the hopefulness that has survived the horror of nothingness when Kolakowski asks: "Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?" The answer, of course, is clear. Now it is up to readers to take up the challenge of his arguments. (shrink)

In this article, we seek to demonstrate how horror movies can be part of writing a political and historical event. Our reflection takes up the question that appears in Barthes in a text called The Writing of the Event, which contains an analysis of May 1968 in France. We looked at two horror movies that contain memories of October 2005 and reflected on "who are we and what we do today?”. Our goal is to contribute to the diagnosis of the (...) present. (shrink)

Horror movies consistently reflect metaphorical associations between verticality and affect, as well as between brightness and affect. For example, bad events happen when movie characters are going downwards, or when lights go off. Monsters and villains emerge from below and from the darkness. And protagonists get lost and stuck in dark underground caves, dungeons, tunnels, mines, bunkers or sewers. Even movies that are primarily set above ground or in bright light have the most suspenseful scenes happening beneath the ground and (...) in the dark. An analysis of several horror movies highlights the striking consistency with which the two metaphors “EVIL IS DOWN” and “EVIL IS DARK” are used within this genre. I will argue that these metaphors help in creating fear. Moreover, I will outline how cinematic manifestations of metaphor elaborate and extend metaphorical concepts and ultimately may have a formative role in keeping metaphors alive within a culture. (shrink)

Can horror films be tragic? From an Aristotelian point of view, the answer would seem to be no. For it is hard to see how a film that places a monster at the center of the plot could evoke pity and fear in the audience. This paper argues that some films belong to both horror and tragedy, and so can be accommodated as tragedies according to Aristotle's framework in the Poetics.

To be publishing this journal as the brutality of war is on display every night on our television screens may seem simultaneously futile and deeply meaningful. With the horrors of Gaza, Israel, and...

J.L. Schellenberg argues that since God, if God exists, possesses both full knowledge by acquaintance of horrific suffering and also infinite compassion, the occurrence of horrific suffering is metaphysically incompatible with the existence of God. In this paper I begin by raising doubts about Schellenberg’s assumptions about divine knowledge by acquaintance and infinite compassion. I then focus on Schellenberg’s claim that necessarily, if God exists and the deepest good of finite persons is unsurpassably great and can be achieved without horrific (...) suffering, then no instances of horrific suffering bring about an improvement great enough to outweigh their great disvalue. I argue that there is no good reason, all things considered, to believe this claim. Thus Schellenberg’s argument from horrors fails. (shrink)

Lucrèce débute son livre III du poème De rerum natura par l’éloge des enseignements d’Épicure - qui effacent la peur de la mort, des fantômes et des dieux - et la description des sentiments suscités par les principes épicuriens. Il écrit, dans les vers 28-30, qu’il ressent à la fois une volupté divine (divina voluptas), allusion probable au plaisir catastématique qui permet d’approcher la quiétude de la divinité, et l’horreur (horror). La formule est énigmatique, voire même contradictoire. En effet les (...) occurrences d’horror dans le De rerum natura démontrent que le terme est lié surtout à la crainte de la mort, des fantômes et des dieux, autrement dit la même peur que les épicuriens veulent éliminer pour donner accès à la volupté divine. Dans cet article, nous étudions cette formule de DRN III, 28-30 et nous proposons une nouvelle solution à sa contradiction interne, qui n’est qu’apparente. Cette solution est fondée sur l’hypothèse d’un emploi thérapeutique de la poétique du sublime. (shrink)

What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society's fear of the "others" that threaten the "normal." The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film's depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, (...) but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across "normal" self and "monstrous" other. This "transformative otherness" confronts viewers with the other's experience-and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror's significance for culture, politics, and art. (shrink)

E allora - possiamo mantenere, anche nel nostro 'Horror Pleni' quotidiano, una consapevolezza?

Los zapatos nos sirven y nos acompañan, testimonian diferentes verdades, dependiendo de su utilidad y su dueño. Pueden ser de vagabundos o de prisioneros, de militares, artistas o campesinos, de adultos o de niños, de asesinos o de asesinados. Muchos guardan un misterio, todos tienen una historia. El arte los ha acogido desde sus comienzos, vinculándolos a diferentes sucesos, como en las obras de Vincent Van Gogh, Can Togay y Gyula Pauer. A partir del trabajo de estos artistas se busca (...) vincular el vacío y el horror en el arte con el tema de la verdad, entendida como alétheia o desocultación, rememoración y acontecimiento, e indagar por la historia que se oculta tras ciertas obras artísticas. (shrink)

Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse.".

Three questions have occupied much of the philosophical literature on cinematic horror: What is horror? How is it able to frighten and disgust? Why do we seek out horror if it horrifies? Although there are numerous other important topics, this entry will focus on these three general questions, since they motivate the overwhelming majority of the philosophical writing on cinematic horror.

This article provides support for the argument that horror media “works” by activating evolved cognitive and affective systems that are flexibly tailored to local socio-ecological contexts. Guided by previous work using evolutionary theory to study horror literature (e.g., Clasen 2012, 2018, 2019), I investigate horror manga’s popularity and international market, which indicate a cross-cultural preoccupation with horror transmedia that is expli­cable in terms of the form’s ability to target evolved psychological systems. Specifically, these multimodal texts elicit the evolved emotions of (...) anxiety, fear, and disgust in response to culturally specific and evolutionarily relevant narratives, characters, antagonists, and environments. Thus, horror manga reflects the myths, folklore, and religious traditions of Japanese society in addition to salient ubiquitous evolutionary threats such as predators, antisocial conspecifics, and infectious diseases. (shrink)

이 논문은 하버마스의 공론장 이론을 새롭게 확장하기 위한 예비작업이다. 이러한 확장을 위해 아드리아나 캬바레로의????호러리즘????을 참고하여 ‘상처 받을 수 있음’(vulnerability)이라는 개념을 수용하였고, 이 논문에서 새로운 공공성과 그 중요성을 논의하는 데 핵심이 되었다. 이 개념은 인간의 보편적 존재조건을 규정하는 개념이지만, 근대적 주체의 완전함과 완전한 주체들의 대칭성을 정당화하는 개념은 아니다. 오히려 근대적 주체의 불완전함을 드러냄으로써 개별적인 주체들을 상처를 통해 서로 의존할 수 있는 주체로 만들었고, 이와 동시에 자신의 불완전함과 타자의 상처 받을 수 있음을 경험하는 가운데 슬픔과 애도를 지속해야 함을 강조함으로써, 소외된 존재들을 향한 (...) 폭력을 거부하고 중단시키는 개념이 되었다. 여기서 바로 새로운 공공성이 출현할 수 있다. 이처럼 박탈된 존재들의 귀환, 이들이 행하는 거부와 중단은 기존의 공공성에 임계를 선물하는 것이므로, 이러한 공공성을 임계적 공공성으로 개념화 했다. 임계적 공공성은 단순히 기존의 중심에 소외된 존재들을 단순히 기입하는 것이 아니라, 기존의 공공성을 완전히 재편함으로써 기존의 폭력을 중단시키려는 부단한 시도를 가능케 한다. 이를 통해 공론장의 대칭성이 비대칭성의 우선성을 근거로 탄생하며, 이 비대칭성이 기존의 공론장에 지속적인 활력을 주는 임계임을 정당화한다. 이 임계에 공적 장소에서 박탈된(privatized) 존재들이 새로운 공적 관계성을 요구하며 귀환하는 것이다. (shrink)

Am I pretty? A simple question that epitomises both beauty and vulgarity in its monstrous representation of feminine embodiment. In this work, I look at the 2007 Japanese Horror film Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman directed by Koji Shiraishi and its relation to the way in which it the monster Kuchisake-Onna presents the idealised role of motherhood in Japan today. Through this critical examination of the film, we see how communities establish social order and gender scripts of the feminine within (...) the media, perpetuating hegemonic normalised roles through the monstrous feminine. This work looks at the Japanese urban legend of Kuchisake-Onna and compares it with the movie monster Carved as it projects forms of femininity and motherhood. By cross-referencing the telling of the legend with popular cinema we can see how media influence takes on a broader context towards the gendering of woman. In both the legend and the film, we see how women seek the approval of self and sovereignty, which is demonised, by revealing herself through sexual autonomy. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the role of non-cognitive affective responses in the philosophical literature on fiction and emotion. This flurry of scholarly interest is partly a reaction to cognitivist accounts of fiction and emotion that have been found to be inadequate. The inadequacy is particularly salient when this approach is employed to account for narrative horror. Cognitivist conceptions of the emotion engendered by narrative horror prove to be too restrictive. Cognitivist accounts also fail to give the formal devices (...) and stylistic elements deployed in narrative horror a proper place within the spectator’s emotional engagement with it. In this paper I propose an alternative conception of the emotion “horror” that incorporates non-cognitive affective responses. I argue that this conception of “horror” is more fine-grained than the one characterized as a cognitivist approach. It captures more literary examples of the horror experience and it accommodates better the fear of the unknown. It also makes possible an aesthetics of horror in which formal devices and stylistic elements are given their proper place. (shrink)

Este trabalho empreende uma discussão a respeito do corpo como materialidade visível no dizível em duas produções cinematográficas de horror (Frontières e À l’interieur), cuja ordem fílmica de horror lança mão das imagens referentes ao acontecimento do Outubro de 2005, o qual foi marcado pelas manifestações e confrontos violentos entre a polícia e os manifestantes nas principais cidades francesas. Esta forma de usar imagens referentes a acontecimentos políticos ou sociais é uma característica das produções cinematográficas americanas de horror dos anos (...) de 1960 a 1970, da qual O massacre da Serra elétrica reconstrói seu roteiro sob a memória do caso de Ed Gein que aconteceu no Estado americano de Wisconsin nos anos de 1950. Nesta discussão, apresentamos uma análise, laçando mão da noção de intericonicidade para tratar das imagens que remetem a outras imagens e, ao mesmo tempo, retomamos a reflexão barthesiana “Como pode um acontecimento ser escrito?”, enunciada, em 1968, para refletir acerca do acontecimento do Maio daquele ano. Quanto ao corpo, tratamos deste objeto pelo prisma da ordem dos empreendimentos foucaultianos em que o corpo aparece como “um protagonista incontornável e multiforme”. (shrink)

In this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. Further complicating matters (...) is that the set appears to be constantly, if slowly, mutating, so that the affects aimed at in the horror of the 1920s do not entirely overlap with those aimed at horror today, or which we might expect horror to aim at a century from now. As such, while we use “horror” as a blanket term across eras, whether some work is a work of horror will always be time-indexed. (shrink)

Many people regularly watch horror films. While it seems clear that sporadically watching horror films will not make us bad people, if it is the main type of media that we consume, then are we still safe? I will defend most horror films from Di Muzio (2006), who worries that we are harming our moral character by watching them. Most horror films (e.g., Candyman, Get Out, and Scream) fall into what I call the summit of safe horror (SoSH), the inverse (...) of the uncanny valley effect, wherein almost-but-not-quite-human robots elicit discomfort from viewers rather than empathy. In the SoSH, violence elicits excitement rather than pity for the victims because the violence is mitigated by, among other things, comic relief and foolish choices by the characters. These narrative features allow most horror films to be intense enough to cause excitement and terror yet not so intense as to cause a negative moral attitude to form in our soul, because we feel what Aristotle would consider the appropriate amount of fear. Torture porn, a subset of horror films lacking plot and focus solely on gore (e.g., the Saw sequels), falls outside of the SoSH because it lacks these narrative features, making the violence depicted too intense to be entertaining. These films outside the SoSH will not necessarily cause an inappropriate amount of fear but are simply the only ones that could possibly do so. Caution: spoilers ahead! (shrink)

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its intended aim. The (...) ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)

Horror is not the same as fear, and while fear contains an essential action tendency horror does not. And while we can enjoy fear there is no enjoying of horror.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the (...) perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

Who would the Saviour have to be, what would the Saviour have to do to rescue human beings from the meaning-destroying experiences of their lives? This book offers a systematic Christology that is at once biblical and philosophical. Starting with human radical vulnerability to horrors such as permanent pain, sadistic abuse or genocide, it develops what must be true about Christ if He is the horror-defeater who ultimately resolves all the problems affecting the human condition and Divine-human relations. Distinctive (...) elements of Marilyn McCord Adams' study are her defence of the two-natures theory, of Christ as Inner Teacher and a functional partner in human flourishing, and her arguments in favour of literal bodily resurrection and of a strong doctrine of corporeal Eucharistic presence. The book concludes that Christ is the One in Whom, not only Christian doctrine, but cosmos, church, and the human psyche hold together. (shrink)

This article will show how, through an expressionist style that references Gothic and noir cinema, Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) mediates concepts found in contemporary post-war French existentialism, in particular the phenomenology of horror of Sartre, with whom the director had a personal association. It will examine how the experience of horror is presented as a conscious apprehension of the world as irrational and no longer conforming to deterministic and conventional order. Les Diaboliques asserts that horror results from a distorted (...) perception that has imbued the world with those qualities, and in this case, perception has been manipulated by the sadistic Other. The article will link this portrayal of horror to Les Diaboliques’ well-established influence on the development of the dominant 1960s and 1970s paranoid-psychological horror film and key figures like Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, suggesting the ontological source of horror in these films as existential phenomenological in nature as opposed to exclusively being the result of psychosexual and familial repression, as is commonly posited by critics. (shrink)

Given its clinical significance, horror should occupy a prominent place within emotion theory. However, conceptualizations of horror within psychological science are relatively underdeveloped and conceptually confused. Through conceptual analysis of the disparate literature on the emotion, we seek to establish horror as a qualitatively distinct mode of engagement with the world and to remedy its over-intellectualization, as evident in many prior accounts. Given its etymology, we first address horror's characteristic immobilization—at the level of stereotypical facial configuration and action readiness—before analyzing (...) horror's formal object and appraisal structure. In the process, we critique schema accounts of the emotion and argue for conceptualizing horror pre-reflectively by grounding it in appraised violations of the practical dynamics of social engagement. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify and provide an explanation for a heretofore unrecognized puzzle in feminist aesthetics and the philosophy of horror. Many horror movie fans have an aversion to rape scenes. This is puzzling because genre fans are not equally bothered by the depiction of other types of violence and cruelty. I argue that we can make sense of this selective aversion by appeal to the notion of ‘distance’, which philosophers of horror use to explain why people are attracted (...) to horror movies in the first place. When we consume horror, we ‘distance’ ourselves from the scary things depicted, which allows other mechanisms to kick in that lead to overall enjoyment. I argue that ‘distance’ often collapses when viewers are confronted with depictions of rape because rape is common in real life and a gendered form of violence that is implicated in social injustice. (shrink)