Horror
Horror
From Latin horror (“‘a bristling, a shaking, trembling as with cold or fear, terror’”) < horrere (“‘to bristle, shake, be terrified’”).
Horror is realization.
Gross stuff. Blood, guts.
Horror is sensed, felt. It is bodily disgust, pain. Awakening pain. Awakening to pain.
When you feel fear through the strategy, the tool of horror, you feel your own guts in your hands. You know you are alive. Horror is the minor fear. The fear of dismemberment.
Horror—revolt, the grotesque, blood. The “horrors” of war, violence—incomplete, wounded life.
These are all things to feel or remember having felt. Horror, more, I think, than realization, is the fear-tool of life.
This is the first fear.
Lovecraft had 5 stories with “horror” in the title, including the archetypal “Dunwich Horror.”
Poe, one of Lovecraft’s most obvious prefigurers, always gets here. He does terror, but he always ends up horror, almost always. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” he’s so terrifying, so obscure and mad and gay, and we are shook. Then the Red Death, the allegory of time and plague and entropy and fucked-ed-ness shows up, and it’s horrifying, which means it can’t be terrifying. It’s just blood and guts.
Horror-as-disgust.
Horror should cause fear. True. But horror also generally causes something like fear but separate from it: Disgust.
Disgust is a huge component of monster-dom and something Lovecraft uses the way a surgeon uses a frickin scalpel.
Shoggoths, perhaps the most archetypally Lovecraftian monster-lumps, are, well, disgusting lumps full of eyes.
Some images actually manage to make the shoggoth cute, which is a shame.
Shoggoths are supposed to look like alien bags of shit—500-foot-wide, hungry, hyperintelligent, childlike, malicious bags of shit, bred by the alien gods and stumbled onto by… well, by anyone.
