Kontextmaschine

4th February 2016

Post reblogged from Wertrationalität with 170 notes

The creation of fear is at the heart of all horror, yet the traditional Gothic model differs a great deal from today’s cinematic and literary blood orgies. Modern horror routinely slices, dices, and disembowels its victims to create a sense of fear. The underlying theme is that the human animal is simply nothing more than meat. For all its claims to superior intelligence and divine favor, humanity can be splattered against the bleak wall of hopelessness without so much as a nod to its dreams of truth and nobility - and fear is generated in the realization of that cold, hard reality. In a common ‘slasher’ film, the question is not so much what will happen as when. Hope that springs for with the coming of dawn is inevitably crushed, for even if the hero can escape the maniac with a cleaver, the monster never dies and the poor hero must spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder.

Gothic horror, by contrast, relies on subtler techniques. It teases and taunts its victim with terrors shrouded in mist. Often the victim is blind to the evil that hovers above like a ravenous spider, and sometimes evil masquerades as virtue, revealing its true nature only too late. By the time danger becomes apparent to the victim, death by an ordinary knife might seem a relief.

There is a fundamental acceptance of the existence of virtue and goodness in the Gothic genre, and evil is all the more terrible for the comparison. The reader doesn’t wonder how the hero and heroine will die, but whether they are spiritually strong enough to survive the blackest night. Fear comes not from a sense of the impending fall of an axe, but from the horrifying truths and temptations that assault them as they fight for their lives.

In the modern horror tale, the source of evil is usually identified early, for it remains unstoppable despite that knowledge. In the Gothic tale, evil is something sinister and unknown. A dark mystery lies beneath the horror, and the protagonists are condemned to unravel it. The innocents are trapped in a whirlpool of conflicting emotion, driven by the desire to learn the awful truth that they sense lies beyond the black shroud, yet dreading it all the while. With each step beyond their comfortable, day-lit world, they discover that reality is more twisted than they could possibly have understood, and that their own virtues may not be sufficient to see them to the dawn.
from Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday, and William Connors, Ravenloft Campaign Setting, p. 6. Two brief thoughts:
1) Some of the most interesting writing on genre comes from the introductions to tabletop roleplaying supplements. This makes sense, on reflection, because making one successfully means creating the tools for amateurs to tell stories in that genre. A real hidden goldmine of critical Discourse, IMO, if presumably as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as anything else.
2) It’s interesting to see this sort of analysis of horror subgenres made before cosmic horror became the highest-prestige tradition within it. Nowadays, post-Scream and the Lovecraft revival, it’s traditional to set up a slasher horror foil (moralizing, humanist, explicit) against the cosmic style (materialist, nihilist, mysterious); here - the text was published in 1994 - it is the slasher foil that is materialist, nihilist, but still explicit against a Gothic style that is moralizing, humanist, but still mysterious.