From: tsm@access.digex.com (The Secret Man)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Fear According to Card: Dread, Terror and Horror
Date: 8 Jan 1993 07:27:48 GMT
Organization: The Quiet Room
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: access.digex.com

chuahl@ocf.berkeley.edu (Chua HakLien) wrote:
> "Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happend, you 
> see its remainder, its relices. The grisly, hacked-up corpse. Your 
> emotions range from nausea to pity for the victim. And even your pity is
> tinged with revulsion and disgust, ultimately you reject the scene and
> deny its humanity; with repetition, horror loses its ability to move you
> and, to some degree, dehumanizes the victim and therefore dehumanizes you."

[previous quote was correctly attributed to O.S. Card]

Card's statement is true as stated, largely because it is so difficult to
convey true horror.  What we get on the silver screen for horror (horror as
defined by Card) is too often exactly what he describes;  the slaughtered
victim displayed in such a fashion as to gross-out the viewing audience, and
cause the viewpoint *character* to experience horror - which almost never
becomes part of *our* experience of the movie.

Imagine that you return home to find that person who you love, more than you
do yourself, hung from a doorframe by their ankles, dead from loss of blood,
having been slowly tortured to death.  You don't just feel the horror of
finding a bloody corpse, the lesser horror;  you feel the horror of the
*idea* that someone exists who could so utterly *destroy* the person you
love;  you feel the horror of *knowing* without a shred of doubt that their
last *hours* were filled with pain, terror, and total degradation;  you
feel the horror that leads back to dread - the horror of *what this death
MEANS* to your world, and your understanding of the world.

The problem with film is that you seldom *care* enough about the characters
to even *begin* to empathize with their horror.  It's much easier to evoke
terror (good camerawork and direction can manage this, and sloppier films
make liberal use of a soundtrack punctuated with noises loud enough to make
almost *anyone* jump out of their seat).  Dread is somewhere in the middle
ground - less difficult to evoke than true horror, but more difficult than
terror.  To evoke dread on film requires more than just honest craftsmanship,
which will usually do to terrify.


Prose stories are vastly different from film, of course.  Even successful
adaptations of books to film seldom capture the *depth of information* that
the reader absorbs while reading a book.  Tremendous amounts of context are
lost, even in an *excellent* adaptation such as THE PRINCESS BRIDE (not
horror, but an almost perfect example of a wonderful adaptation).  The book
can give considerable amounts of background and detail that no movie could
possibly convey, without being 8 hours long.  Any book (if just competently
written) also engages the audience (of one) *directly*, and can put the
reader *in the mind* of the viewpoint character.

The failure of horror (as opposed to dread or terror) in print will most
likely be due to an inability to make the horror *real* to the reader.
The recurring flamewar about whether Lovecraft's work has merit illustrates
the point.  For his critics, Lovecraft's fiction doesn't engage them, and
doesn't make them *believe* in his horrors for the duration of the story.
It doesn't matter whether the "fault" is his or theirs;  in any event, they
don't find THE CALL OF CTHULHU horrifying because, for them, HPL doesn't
suspend their disbelief.  Other examples are left to the reader as an
exercise.
-- 
The Secret Man                                            tsm@access.digex.com
"Well, I've never been to Spain
  but I kind of like the music..."