MCAAD250, Spring'15

As a person who has never seen the enjoyment of being scared by movies, shows, or even haunted houses or the onimous Tower of Terror at Disneyland, I found this subject very interesting. I found two articles that talk about the ideas played out in Noel Carroll’s article, “Why Horror”. I focused on the idea of how horror seems to be so interested and exciting to poeple because horror portrays ideas of the unknowable, like monsters and violence, that people will never actually witness in real life.

Sharon Begley’s article dicusses the sensation horror films evoked when viewers watch them and how the viewer find that enjoyable. The first idea brought up is that “if we have a relatively calm, uneventful lifestyle, we seek out something that’s going to be exciting for us, because our nervous system requires periodic revving, just like a good muscular engine.” This quote shows that people who adventure seekers and looking for new experiences will enjoy horror films because wathcing one makes them feel like they did something dangerous. They create a sense that you just went through something and came out the otherside just fine. It is an intense experience to watch a horror film because even though you think you can handle what is about to happen, it will probably still surprise you.

This leads to the next point made about how horror movies can act as a “cathartic effect, offering you emotional release and escape from the real world of bills and mortgages and the economy and relationships.” It takes your mind away from the outside world completely and after the movie ends there is a sense of release that everything is okay and your problems do not seem as bad.

It is also talked about how people enjoy horror because it feels like you are training to be able to handle anything, like if you can make it through the scariest film or haunted house or whatever it may be, then you acan handle anything in the real world. It is also suggested that “horror films are popular because they speak to the basic human condition of existential fear, the knowledge that we are all doomed.” That there is going to be an end to it all and so horror is a way of dealing with the idea.

The other article I read was also by Noel Carroll called, “The Nature of Horror” in which he discusses similar ideas and takes apart the ideas of why people are so obsessed with horror and the effects of the genre. Carroll dicusses what he calls “art-horror” and how there is an artistic validity to types of horror. He talks about how it is nesscary for there to be two conditions in order to experience art-horror. The two being “the physical sensation of revulsion or disgust, coupled with the sense of being threatened.” He explains that art-horror evokes a physical and emotional response to the situations happening that make it seem so scary and are not the idea of “natural”.

There is also this idea that the viewer have characteristics that are relatable to the characters in the art-horror. Carrol uses examples of monsters like Frankenstein or Dracula and then explains that “the responses of characters often seem to cue the emotional responses of the audience.” It is the idea that art-horror interwines social and cultural attitudes so that the viewers can somehow relate to what is happening in the scene even if everything about it seem unnatural.

Sources:

Begley, Sharon. “Why Our Brains Love Horrow Movies.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, n.d. Web. 10 May 2015.

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46.1 (1987): 51-59. JSTOR. Web. 10 May 2015.

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.