this just in, from kyle, à propos of our thursday discussions of TERROR vs HORROR as cinematic concepts/frameworks. [a word of caution: these wikipedia articles about the SAW movies are explicit and gruesome. if physical violence disgusts or upsets you, you should not click on these wikipedia URLs. NB: they also contain 'spoiler' materials for the films discussed.]
dear professor kirby,
i thought u might like to learn a little more about the saw movies just so you know how terribly creepy they are. these links will take you to the wikipedia articles about them.
saw 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_%28film%29
saw 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_II
these movies fit perfectly into the horror category but they are also terror movies also. i believe that the difference between horror and terror is that horror is something that is temporary like when we see a scary movie. we know that is not true but it still scares us. terror however is something that lasts for a long time, like the threat of nuclear war or terrorism (which
concidentally has the word terror in it). terror is a sustained feeling that even though the thing we are afraid of stops, we still are afraid that it might come back up.
i am fascinated by kyle's distinction between 'terror' and 'horrror' based on whether the effect is temporary. is this how others of you have distinguished between the two concepts? your reactions, please.
5 comments:
I define horror as associated with fear but fear mixed with or inspired by shock or disgust (most specifically I relate it to the Phantom of the Opera book, in which Christine says that her feelings for the Phantom are those of "horror" at his physical ugliness). For example you can be shocked/disgusted/horrified by human sacrifice...by Medea killing her own children after taking revenge on Jason...). It's a different type of fear. Terror is just plain fear, like fear of heights. You're not really disgusted, but you're afraid of it.
A friend of mine defines terror as personal and horror as impersonal. So when something happens to someone else, you're horrified, and then when you realize the same thing could happen to you, or when something happens to you, you're terrified.
Any thoughts on either definition?
lisa, these are really interesting distinctions. and as we'll see soon in aristotle's poetics, there are some ancient underpinnings to the concepts you're getting at here. aristotle points specifically to medea as an example of a play that is MIARON [literally 'defiled'; he seems to mean 'disgusting' in the sense you point to here -- maybe you had this particular aristotle passage in mind?].
the greeks had numerous words for fear. two of them, DEOS and PHOBOS, have received special attention. the latter is sometimes translated 'terror' in the sense of 'fear of immediate, impending danger'; the former gets translated 'dread,' in the sense of a generalized, more low-grade fear that does not rise to the level of panic. neither of them, however, necessarily incorporates the notion of *disgust* that you connect here with *horror*.
but you're not alone in this. i have read others who make precisely this distinction between terror and horror: that terror is fear, pure and simple, whereas horror is fear combined with disgust.
if that is the case, how would we go about applying these terms to the genre of HORROR movies? i.e. what constitutes 'horror' in modern film, and what does not? there is plenty to disgust and shock in movies like these SAW films. are there movies that attempt to inspire fear *without* disgust? if so, do they belong to the same genre as SAW?
there is a third greek word that is highly relevant to this discussion: PHRISSO [aristotle would have pronounced it PHRITTO], to 'shudder' or 'shiver' with fear. in fact this is aristotle's hallmark of the good tragedy -- one that can inspire the PHRIKÊ, the 'shudder,' by its presentation of piteous and fearful events. so my question here is: is the *phrikê* a shudder of pure fear, or fear-and-disgust? could it be either? is one aesthetically superior to the other?
I did not have that passage in mind; I haven't read the Poetics...yet. :)
But I just keep coming back to Phantom, mostly because before Christine says she she feels "horror" for the Phantom, she also says she does NOT "hate" him. You mentioned "piteous" as well as "fearful"--I think Aristotle would have liked Phantom. She pities the Phantom as well as being afraid of him.
At the moment I can't really think of any films that try to inspire "pure" fear/terror and that's all...maybe "horror movie" just SOUNDS better than "terror movie" and that's why the genre got its name? I think maybe some fear is incorporated into a lot of movies, though--in Star Wars, say, there's a moment when they show the drop below Luke when he's holding on with one hand and Vader has just said the famous line...The shot of the huge drop below him is meant to inspire terror and not horror--it's scary, but not really disgusting. That vs. Silence of the Lambs--there is horror--disgust and fear--that such an intelligent person's mind could become so twisted.
To actually answer the question--I don't think either one is superior than the other...horror on the one hand seems very simple--a big slimy monster is disgusting and scary, or some guy with a a bloody knife...but the Phantom, or Hannibal Lecter...they're disgusting and scary, but in a different way, in a more complicated way.
I'm still not really answering the question. I just don't know. I'm going to keep thinking about it.
we could up the ante a bit, and risk muddying the waters [though on the other hand this could help clarify things]:
is the THRILLER [thinking particularly of films here, though perhaps not necessarily exclusively so] a separate category from TERROR and HORROR? is there significant overlap [or significant *non*-overlap] among these categories?
... and what about the SLASHER film? my initial thought was that this is definitely and exclusively a sub-category of the HORROR film. but maybe not.
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