RE: The Unknown – Footnotes to the Craft of Horror in Fiction (1 of 3)
I have often wondered exactly lay at the very core of horror. I've thought about how most traditional horror movies don't keep me up at night but Unsolved Mysteries scared the shit out of me. Horror movies are often based on familiar tropes, sometimes removing the element of the unknown even for the most otherworldly creatures. Unsolved Mysteries, however, introduced you to killers with unknown motives and people missing for no clear reason, and we're told it is all real, just before the show ends and leaves us with a gigantic black square. Of course I'd kill the director who made a movie that way, but they are stuck with the expectation of clever resolution. Perhaps that is why found footage type films can get away with more ambiguity and, judging by box office receipts, endless fear.
That's a very precise assessment, candifolly! Most horror movies rely on familiar tropes (like zombies or ghosts) and even more familiar and cheap techniques (like jump scares). Some of these movies may be quite entertaining, but your are ultimately seeing something closer to action/adventure with horror elements than actual horror. Besides, when the “monster” is defeated (as it often happens in movies), the odds of the audience actually being afraid when the movie is over are quite slim. As you noted, it is precisely when no clear resolution has been reached that fear may flourish. The ambiguous, the unclear and the unknown will always be more frightening than gore and violence. = )
True. I've never found gore frightening (whether we're talking about guts or the former US vice president). Hitchcock is often more frightening and there is little blood. I'm not just talking about Psycho, which for all it's strenghts suffers from the prolonged exposition at the end.... Where the monster is explained. I find Rope far more frightening. Thr killer did it because he fucking wanted to, and can we know what he might do to the others while arranging his vignette around the victim's grave? There are plays within plays, but then there is the play within Rope that was written by a monster. Now we are living inside the black square.
Nicely put! Interestingly, the least we know about the “monster”, the more it can make us feel dread (even if such monster is just a human). Normally, fiction tries to portray characters as thoroughly as possible. However, horror follows a different set of rules. When we don’t know what to think of the object of horror (be it a cosmic beast or a creepy child), we start to fill out the blanks. And we fill them with what we find most terrifying. In other words, when we don’t know what a character in fictional horror will do (in the sense that we cannot decipher or understand his motives), we just assume it will do the worst thing we (at an intimate and subjective level) can imagine!