Horror

Horror is the feeling of revulsion that usually follows a frightening sight, sound, or otherwise experience. It is the feeling one gets after coming to an awful realization or experiencing a deeply unpleasant occurrence. In other words, horror is more related to being shocked or scared (being horrified), while terror is more related to being anxious or fearful.

Walter E. Kurtz: I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. ~ John Milius and Francis Coppola

Quotes

The work of horror, it has been argued, is to uncover what a repressive culture like ours would hope is dead and buried. But as far as public discourse is concerned, black culture — more often being repressed than doing the repressing — doesn’t have room or patience for fantasy. ~ K. Austin Collins

I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them. Some may not like them. That is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid. ~ William Gaines

The horror genre has changed throughout the years depending on what’s going on in the world. A lot of feminists will say the slasher films where women were being butchered were, in some ways, because women were becoming emancipated. They think killing women was a reaction to that, but a lot of times the women, in the end, were the heroes and the only one who lived so it had a feminist edge there. ~ John Kassir

When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much. ~ Christopher Lee

• I will make this city an object of horror and something to whistle at. Every last one passing by it will stare in horror and whistle over all its plagues.
  • The Bible, Book of Jeremiah 19:7-9, NWT.

• I look before me at my lighted candles,
  I don’t want to turn around and see with horror
  How quickly the dark line is lengthening,
  How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out.
  • Constantine P. Cavafy, Candles (Κεριά), as translated by Manolis, in Constantine P. Cavafy: Poems (2008) edited by George Amabile.

• Recent history has reminded us that racial terror makes for an effective freak show, as anyone following the cycle of police shooting, to protest, to grand jury acquittal already knows. H.P. Lovecraft once wrote of the difference between "mere physical fear" and "cosmic fear": the difference between being grossed out and, in the cosmic extreme, of having one’s sense of how the world works upended. True horror is cosmic fear. It’s there when I pass by cops at night, or when there’s a Confederate flag waving from the truck of a customer in the same restaurant as me. Horror, as Lovecraft described it, beckons "unexplainable dread." Keyword: unexplainable. Racism is no mystery. But whether it’s in store, at any given moment, certainly is.
  • K. Austin Collins, “Race Is the Past and Future of Horror Movies”, The Ringer, (Oct 31, 2016).

• The work of horror, it has been argued, is to uncover what a repressive culture like ours would hope is dead and buried. But as far as public discourse is concerned, black culture — more often being repressed than doing the repressing — doesn’t have room or patience for fantasy.
  • K. Austin Collins, “Race Is the Past and Future of Horror Movies”, The Ringer, (Oct 31, 2016).

• When I finally took my husband to see Pet Sematary a few months ago, I looked over during the film, and my husband had his hands over his face...it was too funny.
  Women are wired to give birth, so maybe there's something in us that makes us more immune to horror, films with girls in bikinis getting raped and killed make me angry, but a really chilling horror film where it really gets under your skin and like it really could happen, those are the ones I like.
  • Denise Crosby, in "Horror Interview: Denise Crosby wants you to be WEIRD.", The Horror Honeys, (08/2014).

• “Jokes and horror work on the same mechanism,” said writer Ellis. “Tension and release. For me, it’s more of an instinct for what a scene needs, and listening to the characters speak.
  • Warren Ellis as quoted by Brittany Vincent, “Warren Ellis on the Tender Vision of Dracula’s Curse in Netflix’s ‘Castlevania’”, “Variety”, (November 28, 2018)

• I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them. Some may not like them. That is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.
  • William Gaines, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, (April 22, 1954)

• The horror genre has changed throughout the years depending on what’s going on in the world. A lot of feminists will say the slasher films where women were being butchered were, in some ways, because women were becoming emancipated. They think killing women was a reaction to that, but a lot of times the women, in the end, were the heroes and the only one who lived so it had a feminist edge there. Then when we were all afraid of nuclear weapons there were all these films with Sci-Fi edge things that had been created out of nuclear waste. Who knows, they will always find something that is scary that is relevant to what we are going through. The resurgence of the Mummy came around when the gulf war was going on because people have always found the Middle East kind of mysterious. I think society can breathe “death”, as The Crypt Keeper would say, into horror.
  • John Kassir, “Interview – John Kassir of Tales from the Crypt”, (January 13, 2014)

• I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
  • Walter E. Kurtz, interpreted by Marlon Brando in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, written by John Milius and Francis Coppola.

• That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.
  • Christopher Lee, Sir Christopher Lee interview: 'I’m softer than people think' (2011).

• What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end.
  • Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 27

• The horror experience is most scary when the player really isn’t sure whether their character is going to live or die – death and survival need to be on a constant see-saw. If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies. Creating that situation is vital. Also, I don’t want to just stand there shooting dozens of enemies. Die! Die! Die! I don’t have the energy for that.
  • Shinji Mikami, "The Godfather of Horror Games", The Guardian, (30 Septemember 2014).

• Better an end with horror than a horror without end.
  • Ferdinand von Schill (May 1809)

• ...murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism ... and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality and horror.
  • United States Senate Judiciary Committees summary of horror comics (1954); as quoted in "Horror! Book Digs Up Lurid ‘Pre-Code’ Monster Comics", Hugh Hart, Wired, 10.31.10.

• 72% of people report watching at last one horror movie every 6 months, and the reasons for doing so, besides the feelings of fear and anxiety, was primarily that of excitement. Watching horror movies was also an excuse to socialise, with many people preferring to watch horror movies with others than on their own.
  People found horror that was psychological in nature and based on real events the scariest, and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied rather than what they could actually see.
  • University of Turku, "Horror movies manipulate brain activity expertly to enhance excitement", ScienceDaily, 24 January 2020.

• During those times when anxiety is slowly increasing, regions of the brain involved in visual and auditory perception become more active, as the need to attend for cues of threat in the environment become more important. After a sudden shock, brain activity is more evident in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making, enabling a rapid response.
  However, these regions are in continuous talk-back with sensory regions throughout the movie, as if the sensory regions were preparing response networks as a scary event was becoming increasingly likely.
  Therefore, our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threat, and horror movies exploit this expertly to enhance our excitement, explains Researcher Matthew Hudson.
  • University of Turku, ""Horror movies manipulate brain activity expertly to enhance excitement", ScienceDaily, 24 January 2020.

• What is almost universally true of horror is that it’s been used as a tool to express social and political discontent for the marginalized since its creation. It’s a kind of popcorn propaganda that’s allowed writers and filmmakers to voice their anxieties while couching them in titillating narratives that would fly below any political censors.
  • April Wolfe, "Why We Need Horror Movies Now More Than Ever", L.A. Weekly, (May 12, 2017).

• As far back as 1794, for instance, women like Ann Radcliffe were writing the original Final Girls, like the character of Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho, who escapes vengeful, domineering men in a creepy old castle to become an autonomous woman. Radcliffe paved the way for Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart"), Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and, of course, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). These authors were popular in their time, but they’ve remained a collective compass for much of the horror to follow, and what they all have in common are concerns with ethics. Horror stories are, at their hearts, morality tales.
  • April Wolfe, "Why We Need Horror Movies Now More Than Ever", L.A. Weekly, (May 12, 2017).

• Horror is barely ever on the side of the powerful or the mean. The good writers and filmmakers of the genre can tap into our very real fears and follow them to their logical conclusions.
  • April Wolfe, "Why We Need Horror Movies Now More Than Ever", L.A. Weekly, (May 12, 2017).

• Going all the way back to the twenties, the horror movies of the Silent Era with Lon Chaney, there's alot of twisted people. The monster was just a mutilated person. When people came back from World War I they came back without limbs. They came back in somewhat-living pieces.
  • Brian Yuzna, Nightmares in Red White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film, a 2009 documentary, beginning at 4:25