Put another way: If horror doesn’t get you scared, then what are you getting? It does happen to me on occasion though, this sense of frisson: I remember the worrying, childhood anxiety of the doomsday clock in John Bellairs’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, that horrible cosmic grandeur I experienced the first time I turned the pages of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, or the overbearing sense of inexorable supernatural fate in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.īut if invoking this feeling of fear is such a rare experience-a sort of holy grail of reader reaction-then you might rightly wonder why I carry on exploring this particular section of the library? Am I not effectively one among the crowd, professing with a sneer, that didn’t scare me? It’s a reasonable question. It’s not even the brevity of this comment that bothers me, but rather that this grunt seems to convey a shallow understanding of horror: “That didn’t scare me.”Īs a life-long connoisseur of horror, I seldom experience genuine “fear” while reading (or viewing)-that adrenaline-fuelled dread termed “art-horror” by Noel Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror. It’s the sort of comment you overhear when leaving the cinema or that you might witness among a torrent of social-media posts, not generally known for their insight or elucidation in the first place.
“That didn’t scare me.” This level of criticism grates my sensibilities.
0 kommentar(er)
