LOG:231310.11-3. Why Horror?

"http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Do-We-Enjoy-Horror-Films?&id=1060951"

The article above states:

Noal Carroll (1987) presents a co-existentialist theory, where it is curiosity which drives us to horror, more specifically it is our curiosity about what we believe to be naturally, as apposed to logically, impossible. We find pleasure in curiosity, however to get this curiosity we need to be presented with an impossible being to be curious about. In order to seem impossible to us a being must cross the boundaries we have used to classify nature, for example, something that posses the qualities of more than one type of animal, something living and dead, bodies which are not complete, or bodies which possess more than we would expect. These creatures will inspire awe and fascination amongst us but due to their nature they will also disgust us.

Mary Douglas suggested that these creatures which defy category incite us to instinctive aversion, that they are above all ANOMALOUS. It is the anomalous that scares us collectively, for it is that which is anomalous that has in the past poisoned, polluted and in other ways endangered us. Socially, we need categories in order to communicate a large amount of information quickly, and the longer it takes to do this, the more chance there is that the anomalous shape before you will eat you.

I have always been drawn to the anomalous because it is within this as yet uncategorised object that the futures are germinated. It is the anomalous that lives in Turners 'liminal' spaces. Those things without clear shapes, without clear boundaries, remniscent of Lovecrafts monsters from unfathomable space. New archetypes, new rituals, new ways of seeing and interacting with the world are arrived at through a passage through the anomalous, through the liminal. Turner was always quick to point out, however, that liminal spaces are dangerous. They threaten the established order of things.

It is naive to think that within such liminal spaces futures abound resplendant in golden opportunities. It is naive to think that dreams are safe, and comfortable, and that they can't hurt us, because they exist in an area of existence that is untamed. Its very nature is the Wild, and only a fool would dare set foot upon that path with expectations of treasure and adventure without great risk. The fool is my recurring first chapter.

It is good to be afraid. As Mark Twain once said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear".



The video below is a sample of an hour long interrogation of one of my muses (a sort of brainstorming). Around midnight, I began to talk to myself in the mirror, asking myself questions, and this soon developed into my questioning of the character that arose during that conversation. I had no intention of exploring the themes that developed, they simply arose. One thing I note now that I look back upon it is that these themes are familiar - a powerful family, a forgotten history - and one might even say cliched. What I enjoyed about this was that it was spontaneous, it was a true to form conversation with a real character, one who will no doubt develop an integrity and deeper substance with further enquiry.

One of the sequences that my digital camera edited out occurred quite late on into the conversation, indeed it was the closing of the conversation. My question "where are they from" became "where are they now", and the image I got back was simply black, the sensation was hunger. Three archetypes spring to mind in retrospect - the Vampire, the Gangster, and the Alien.

I got a sense that the character believed it was an Alien, in outer space somewhere, enveloped in its habitually unfathomable blackness. HOWEVER, beneath that I sensed that the thing had forgotten where it was. It didn't know. It was an anomaly unto itself, and this is what made it all the more...juicy. I was left with the question: what if you forgot who you were, where you were, and how you got there. If you forgot how long you'd been there, would you forget to die? I imagined someone buried somewhere, who's been there so long without stimulation, without feeling, without light or food or any outward sign of its existence that it has become seperate from whatever was once its body. Seperate, and yet bound to it somehow. I got all of this because I saw its eyes in mine - they transformed, aged, and took on a bloated, glassy appearance, and it was as if they were too big for my head. They seemed to be three hundred years old, and had a detached quality to them, as if they suffused and exuded from my own eyes. "The roaming eyes" of the vampire. Quite delicious.