After reading the article “Why Horror” by Noel Carroll, I have a brief understanding to how horror fiction writers catch their audiences’ attention and peak their anxieties/fears. Basically, there are two main factors that build our interest to the horror stories. First, by using filming techniques and writing skills. Through different techniques, it is not hard to influence a person to be frightened or more curiously in a storyline. Second, Carroll expresses that audiences have a certain need for fulfilling emotions such as “curiosity, excitement, and the affection of uncertainty”. With these two factors , Carroll revealed the principles or spirits of horror movies industry and how they works in sparking people’s nerves and fears. For this assignment, I found two online articles that agree with the ideas that Carroll expressed in his article.
The first article I found was “Why Our Brains Love Horror Movies” by Sharon Begley. In the article, Begley analyzed major reasons why most people would want to spend their money watching horror movies and its relations to physiological reaction of human’s nervous cells while watching the movies. She described that human’s nervous system required “periodic revving” to be continuously active and watching horror movies will excite this part of nerve system and keep the system active. In current society, many people face a lot of stress during their daily life, such as unemployment, education and health problems. When they go to the movie theater and watch horror movies, they can use this way to active their nerve system and release stress. It releases stress with the influential writing and storyline that engages the audience to feel “curiosity, excitement, and the affection of uncertainty”. It puts the audience in a world that they know is not real, which adds comfort know that the “horror” is not real, but it keeps the mind active in a way that relieves stress. The “Safe” property of horror movies will attract people to increase their visit of horror scene. Unlike, for example, extreme sports, which may bring dangerous, horror movie can bring people the feeling of excitement without getting hurt.
The second article I found answers the theory that horror movie “touches” psychologically with curiosity. “The Allure of Horror” by Scott Nicholson, demonstrated similar notions with Carroll’s. Within horror stories, what drives the story lines and its success is based on curiosity. Carroll has made this point well in his article, “Monsters are, then, natural subjects for curiosity, and they straightforwardly warrant the ratiocinative energies the plot lavishes upon them” (pp. 281) As a movie watcher myself, I like to explore into something unknown and uncertain, and I would assume others do as well. At the same time, I know that most people fear the unknown and uncertain objects. When the sense of fear and curiosity in our mind competing with each other, the sense of curiosity normally overweigh the fears because we don’t know whether the object is as a bad as we make it out to be, so we must explore the unknown to find out. In this case, curiosity drives people to discover the horror.
Carroll, N. (2002). Why Horror?. In Neill, A. & Riley, A. (eds.) Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (2nd ed., Chap. 17). New York, NY: Routledge.
Begley, S. (2011). ‘Why Our Brains Love Horror Movies’, The Daily Beast. Retrieved February 17, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/25/why-our-brains-love-horror-movies-fear-catharsis-a-sense-of-doom.html
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/scottst22.htm
