The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, literature, media and communication, film, television, psychology, and related fields.

Horror and Philosophy: Essays on Their Intersection in Film, Television and Literature is edited by Assistant Professor Subashish Bhattacharjee, who teaches English at the University of North Bengal, India and Professor Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, who teaches film at the Buenos Aires University (UBA), Argentina).

The TU Library collection also includes other books about different aspects of horror and philosophy.

Professor Noël Carroll, who teaches philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY), the United States of America, is author of The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the heart, a copy of which is in the TU Library collection.

In an essay posted online, Professor Carroll observed:

As a first approximation, we might define “a monster” as a being whose existence is denied by contemporary science.  This is a good start; it distinguishes the kind of characters in which we are interested from various other sorts of villains, like the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry. But, it is too broad, since it includes Superman and Peter Pan in the same category as Dracula and Pennywise the Clown.  And even if we are willing to label such benign creatures as monsters, they are not the sort of monsters that inhabit the genre of horror.

So, what does it take to be a horrifying monster?  For, if we could identify the properties of those particular monsters, the horrific ones, we would be on our way to discovering the emotions they are meant to elicit. What are the salient features of the monsters that lurk in the stories and images of the horror genre? Perhaps their most salient attribute is that they are (above all else) dangerous. They have certain powers and advantages and they are hostile to humans, or, at least, to a subset of human beings; usually innocent human beings, people who do not deserve to be victimized. The relevant monsters are dangerous or threatening because they are very powerful—either mentally and/or physically—or they have special abilities that they wield with lethal effect. Frankenstein’s monster possesses superhuman strength, while Dracula can hypnotize his prey. Zombies, although pretty ineffective when faced one at a time, are very dangerous in encircling groups; and velociraptors are powerful, fast, and smart.  In short, horrific monsters are threatening to people like us.

Although we humans are now the most dominant life form on earth, for most of our career on this planet, we have been prey.  This is, of course, a major theme in horror fiction and undoubtedly part of our fascination with the genre. For, in horror stories, we are typically being relentlessly stalked, often by our hungry conspecifics, as we are in The Night of the Living Dead.  Horror rekindles one of our most primitive emotions as prey: fear. […]

Many horrific monsters are categorically contradictory. That is, their essential, ontological features are incompatible. So many monsters are both living and dead. Some prime examples of this include ghosts, vampires, mummies, Frankenstein’s monster, and zombies, especially those in the lineage of The Night of the Living Dead whose morbidity is etched upon their flesh. Other categorically contradictory horrific beings include those that conflate the animate and the inanimate, such as haunted houses, willful objects, and Stephen King’s possessed Plymouth Fury, ”Christine”.

Quite a few horrific monsters are incomplete. Zombies, again, are an excellent example. Parts are always being detached from their bodies. Sometimes they are only heads with no bodies. Some monsters are only body parts, usually just hands as in William Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers.”  In Donovan’s Brain the monster is a brain in a vat.  In Fiend without a Face, the monsters are brains that use their spinal cords as tails – all the better to choke you with. […]

In certain other cases, the pertinent monstrous creature (or creatures) is something that within our culture we already regard as disgusting, which is then magnified and massified for horrific effect. By “magnified”, I mean antecedently-repulsive beings like spiders, scorpions, or anaconda snakes are made larger, which makes them more dangerous whilst still retaining their gross-out potential. By “massified,” I have in mind setting huge swarms of killer bees or army ants being pitted against unwitting humanity for a final showdown. […]

Thus, disgust, along with fear, is a central feature of horror. For Aristotle, tragedy was defined, in part, in terms of the arousal of pity and fear. Horror, in contrast, is in the business of arousing fear and disgust. Fear is aroused in virtue of the threat the monster poses; disgust is engendered in virtue of the monster’s interstitiality, contradictoriness, incompleteness and/or formlessness and/or the magnification or massification of the creature’s antecedent repugnance, often augmented by horrific metonymy. What we call horror with reference to the fictional genre of that name is an emotional compound of fear and disgust in response to design of the monsters that define horrific narratives and/or images.

One objection to this account that is often made is that horror fictions do not always contain monsters in my sense—that is, creatures whose existence is denied by contemporary science. In some horror fictions, it may be argued, the antagonists are just psychotic human beings, while in others the threat comes from existing animals like sharks.

However, I think that a closer look at these examples reveals that the most famous horrific psychotics have something supernatural about them. Michael Myers can’t be killed in addition to his uncanny ability to appear and disappear seemingly at will, not to mention his superhuman strength and durability. Hannibal Lector, on the other hand, is unlike any existing psychotic. He is to all intents and purposes omniscient. He is more like Mephistopheles than like any mental patient you will ever encounter. Moreover, the sharks in the Jaws cycle are way too smart to be an actual fish. In Jaws: The Revenge the eponymous shark seeking vengeance follows a family to the Bahamas in search of retribution!

I want to stress the importance of the monsters in horror fictions being outside the ken of contemporary science not only to defend my account of the nature of horror fiction, but because I think it also suggests a large part of the allure of the genre. Why do we open the next book by Stephen King or head to the cinema to see an adaptation of it? Because by imagining something beyond science, it promises a glimpse of something unknown that whets our curiosity. The result is not always as fascinating as advertised. So the contract is fulfilled often enough that many of us are willing to renew it.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)