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Foreword

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Introduction: The Art of Horror

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Evolution of the Horror Story

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Understanding Horror and Its Attractions

The Appeal of the Unknown

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H.P. Lovecraft

The oldest and strongest of human emotions is fear, especially fear of the unknown. When the unknown involves a sense of dark and malevolent powers operating somewhere beyond everyday human reality, it can generate a sense of ``cosmic fear.'' This is the fear that the true weird tale generates

Some Defining Elements of Horror

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Stephen King

As a genre, horror exists on three levels, each one defined by the emotion it aims to produce. The highest level aims for terror, the finest emotion; the second level aims for horror, more of a visceral response; and the third level aims for revulsion and disgust. The horror tale is by its very nature symbolic, and this capacity for symbolism---which allows for the expression of normally forbidden emotions---helps explain horror's appeal

The Paradox of Horror

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Noel Carroll

The paradox of horror lies in the fact that people obviously enjoy the negative emotions horror creates, emotions that they would avoid in ``real'' life. What people find pleasurable about horror is the confrontation with horrific beings---monsters---that defy normal cultural categories. The disclosure of such unknown and impossible beings calls for processes of proof, discovery, and confirmation that provide naturally curious human beings with cognitive pleasures

Five Characteristics of Postmodern Horror

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Isabel Cristina Pinedo

The postmodern period in horror films began during the social unrest of the 1960s. The postmodern horror film exhibits five characteristics that operate together to define it: 1) the everyday world is violently disrupted; 2) boundaries are transgressed and violated; 3) the validity of rationality is questioned; 4) narrative closure is repudiated; and 5) a bounded experience of fear is produced. Horror literature often operates in a similar fashion

The Gothic and the Grotesque

The Gothic Novel, 1764-Present

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Anne Williams

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, was an immediate best-seller and set the stage for a popular fascination with Gothic fiction. Interest in the Gothic lasted for nearly a half century and has since undergone several revivals. Gothic narrative formulas can be read as complex cultural metaphors, which may explain their continuing appeal

Elements of the Gothic

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Linda Bayer-Berenbaum

Though the term Gothic originated in Renaissance discussions of medieval architecture, the Gothic movement in literature and art began in England during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Characteristic elements of Gothic literature include recurring character types, plots, and themes as well as common psychological and sexual attitudes. Terror is a primary ingredient in the Gothic formula, but more importantly the essential tenet of Gothicism is an expansion of consciousness and reality

The Grotesque in Literature

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Bernard McElory

Humankind's fascination with the monstrous is the source of the grotesque in art and literature. The special sort of fear produced by images of the grotesque can be linked to the eerie, unsettling feeling Sigmund Freud labeled ``the uncanny,'' and more specifically to that component of the uncanny that arises from a primitive, magical view of the world

The Gothic Tradition in American Literature

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Joyce Carol Oates

The extreme Gothic sensibility that marks so much American literature springs from Puritanism and specifically from such paradoxes of Puritan theology as original sin and the Covenant of Grace. This sensibility---which informs the work of such great American writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James---involves a powerful sense of paranoia and consequent assaults upon individual autonomy and identity. The self in American Gothic is a divided self

Poe and the Gothic

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Clark Griffith

Poe's tales of terror are heavily indebted to earlier Gothic fiction, and yet Poe made significant contributions to the Gothic tradition in literature. Most significantly, through his use of first-person narrators, Poe found a way to internalize and psychologize the Gothic, thus proving his contention that ``terror is not of Germany but of the soul.''

Three Classic Horror Novels

Biographical Contexts for Frankenstein

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Wendy Lesser

Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was the daughter of two English radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and the mistress and later the wife of the English poet Percy Shelley. All three influenced her intellectually. The inspiration for Frankenstein came during the summer of 1815, when Mary and Percy were staying at a villa on the shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva with the famous English poet Lord Byron

Death and Birth in Frankenstein

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Ellen Moers

Haunted by painful memories of her own motherhood, Mary Shelley produced in Frankenstein a myth of genuine originality centering on issues of death and birth. In the character of Victor Frankenstein she created the mad scientist who tries to produce human life from parts of dead bodies only to discover that he has instead made a monster

Analyzing Dracula's Enduring Popularity

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James B. Twitchell

Dracula, the consummate retelling of the vampire story, is a novel of psychological terror rather than physical violence. The novel is rich with sublimated sexuality, but the psychic core of Dracula's story is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's ``primal horde'' theory and derives its continuing appeal from the struggle to overthrow the powerful father-figure represented by Dracula

Dracula's Antifeminism

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Bram Dijkstra

Dracula was written during a period in which male culture was waging a war against the dignity and self-respect of women. Bram Stoker's novel embodies this antifeminine obession through the dualistic opposition of the two central female characters. Lucy represents the negative side of woman---sexually aggressive and degenerative---while Mina represents the ideal modern woman, sexually passive and subordinate to the male

Identity and Repression in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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Mark Jancovich

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde examines the problem of personal identity through a story of physical and psychological transformation. Hyde and Jekyll are the public and private faces of a typical Victorian middle-class man. The novel suggests that middle-class social life creates two selves---a public self and a hidden, private self---that are constantly in conflict. Hyde, Jekyll's private self, must be repressed, but not because he is monstrous; rather, he is monstrous because he is kept repressed

Tensions and Anxieties in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

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Susan J. Wolfson

Barry V. Qualls

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the most famous fable in English literature on the theme of spilt personality. However, although Robert Louis Stevenson is certainly writing about the polarities of personality that can cause this ``split'' in an individual, he is also examining how they are linked to larger cultural tensions and anxieties

Modern Masters of Horror

H.P. Lovecraft's Life and Work

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Robert Bloch

Although H.P. Lovecraft is now generally recognized as a master of horror fiction, several earlier critics attacked him, accusing him of producing ``sick'' literature. This verdict was unfair and did not do justice to the disturbing nightmare visions of ``cosmic terror'' that inform Lovecraft's work and represent his original contribution to horror literature

Stephen King's ``Art of Darkness''

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Douglas E. Winter

Stephen King's novels and short stories frequently enact the ``terror-trip,'' which is the recurrent nightmare of American literature. His characters often search for meaning in their adult lives while glancing back to the lost innocence of their childhoods---one reason why children play so important a role in much of King's fiction

The Novels of Anne Rice

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Lynda Haas

Robert Haas

The central characters in Anne Rice's novels are ``boundary creatures'' who can never be a part of the normal or dominant society. Positioning her characters in this manner---outside ``normal'' human society, on its margins, looking in---makes it possible for Rice to comment on society and question personal identity and the culture at large

Sex, Death, and Violence in the Early Works of Clive Barker

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S.T. Joshi

The keynote of Barker's early work is a frenetic mix of gruesome physical horror, conventional supernaturalism, and explicit sex. In the majority of his works, this mix proves to be excessive and as a result undermines or negates any genuine aesthetic purpose Barker might have had in mind

Chronology

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For Further Research

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Index

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