The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion

Abstract

With its roots in the English gothic novel of the eighteenth century and a body of work that spreads across different media, the horror genre has persisted in art for more than a century, gaining gradual popularity among audiences. Its success has been particularly pronounced in cinema, where horror films like The Exorcist, Jaws, Alien, Silence of the Lambs, and numerous others rank among the major box office hits in cinematic history. With success, however, comes reflection: what is the attraction of such harrowing fiction? The many subgenres that arose in the development of horror and its many narrative commonalities with other genres, such as the sci‐fi or the psychological thriller, make the project of defining horror a daunting task.1 Relying on a pretheoretical understanding of the genre, it is enough for the purposes of this article to focus on its mark, that is, the aim of generating fear and disgust in the audience, in response to a supernatural or abnormal being that is perceived as threatening, such as a monster, a psychopath, a zombie, a freak. The formal features of horror—such as narrative structure, camera viewpoint, editing, and musical score—are conducive to and serve to heighten this emotional effect. The emotions on which the horror genre trades are identified in the emotion literature as negative emotions par excellence, regardless of the theory of emotion endorsed. Although there is no similar consensus on what determines their negative valence (that is, why they should be classified as negative emotions), fear and disgust are generally regarded as intrinsically unpleasant and, being such, as emotions that we avoid experiencing in real life, along with the situations that elicit them. The traditional conception of horror emotions, coupled with the popularity of the genre, gives rise to a paradox: why are audiences attracted to horror if it generates emotions that we avoid in real life?2 Noël Carroll, assuming a hedonic dimension to this attraction, is asking, “How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?”3 In what follows, I attempt to provide a coherent answer to these questions. Taking fear as the paradigm horror emotion, I develop an integrationist moderate hedonic account of the attraction of horror. Following Gary Iseminger's classification, the account is integrationist to the extent that it traces the attraction of horror in the emotional experience it elicits: an experience, I argue, that is potentially both beneficial and rewarding, unlike its real‐life occurrences.4 It is a moderate hedonic account in acknowledging that the experience is enjoyable, but enjoyment here is understood as a welcoming stance that the subject has toward her experience rather than as positive affect. The proposed account of the hedonic character of horror experience is further embedded in an account of the nature of horror emotion that goes against traditional beliefs regarding its negative valence. Drawing on Jesse Prinz's account of emotional valence, I argue that fear in response to horror can be experienced as an overall positive emotion, that is, an emotion toward which the subject has a positive stance and thus enjoys experiencing, leaving it open whether the emotional experience is also affectively pleasurable or affectively painful. The paradox of horror has attracted much discussion in the philosophical literature. We need, at this point, to consider briefly some of the proposed accounts of the attraction of horror and highlight their weaknesses with a view to getting clearer about the aspects of horror experience that need to be accounted for. This will pave the way for the account of the appeal of horror that I develop in Section IV. If one accepts with tradition that the emotions experienced in response to horror are intrinsically unpleasant, then one needs to trace the attraction of horror not in the experience of such emotions but in some other aspect of our overall encounter with the fictional work. For example, according to Carroll, the pleasure derived from horror fiction is cognitive. Carroll identifies the typical objects of horror as monsters, that is, beings that lie “outside our standing conceptual schemes.”5 Being violations of our usual categories of thought, he argues, such beings are disturbing, distressing, and disgusting. For the same reason, however, they attract our attention and elicit our curiosity: we want to know more about the nature and threatening behavior of those beings, to find out how their existence is unveiled in the fiction, and, eventually, how or if they can be destroyed. Such curiosity is aided and properly guided by the narrative, which is “concerned to render the unknown known by processes of discovery, explanation, proof, hypothesis, confirmation and so on.”6 The appeal of horror is thus for Carroll the pleasure of the disclosure of the horrific being: a cognitive pleasure that supposedly is potent enough to compensate for the negative emotional side effects of our encounter with such a being. Carroll's account of the appeal of horror has attracted the following objection: it is hard to provide a convincing account of the ways in which cognitive pleasure can outweigh affective pain, especially in repeated viewings or readings where the element of curiosity is lessened.7 Further, and more importantly, it is doubtful whether audiences indeed derive mostly cognitive and thus dispassionate pleasurable experiences in response to horror fiction. Rather, the enjoyment that audiences derive from horror seems to be bound up with the emotional responses that it elicits, as audiences’ own reports indicate. (We have, I take it, no prima facie reason to assume that audiences are massively in error regarding the source of their enjoyment.) The attraction of horror from this integrationist perspective has its source in the emotional engagement with the fiction (and not just in one's cognitive engagement with it): the narrative processes that Carroll highlights as basic in horror fiction may indeed be basic, but to the extent that they are instrumental to (that is, they aid and guide) that emotional engagement. The integrationist perspective gains support from psychological research on horror films. In a meta‐analysis of such research, Cynthia Hoffner and Kenneth Levine note “a significant positive correlation between enjoyment and negative affect during viewing.”8 Although the correlation is stronger for male viewers than for female viewers, still “negative affect [is] associated with greater enjoyment for both groups.”9 The observed correlation takes us back to one of the questions with which we began, that is, how can audiences enjoy experiencing negative affect in response to horror, even if there are additional hedonic dimensions in our encounter with the fiction, such as those related to aspects of the narrative.10 More importantly, the positive correlation between the experience of negative affect and the enjoyment of horror suggests an integrationist answer to this question. Most philosophical discussions of the paradox of horror argue from an integrationist perspective, that is, they assume that the attraction of horror has its source in the negative affect that it elicits. Such a perspective is put forth by Susan Feagin. Focusing on the feeling components of fear and disgust—“the adrenalin rush, the tingles and the queasiness”—Feagin argues that one can come to enjoy these aspects of the emotional experience and such enjoyment “can function to reinforce one's attraction to the kinds of things which generate them,” in this case horror fiction.11 Feagin's central insight is shared by Alex Neill and John Morreall. Neill, on the one hand, argues that “the feelings and sensations that go with emotions such as pity or fear or horror typically aren't painful or unpleasant” and traces instead the source of unpleasantness of the relevant emotions on the aversive situations in response to which we experience them.12 Morreall, on the other hand, argues that “the excitement that we feel in fear”—an excitement produced by physiological changes such as an increase in alertness and muscle tension, an increased heartbeat, and so on—“is what makes fear potentially enjoyable, [e]specially for someone who a Carroll an that seems to integrationist hedonic accounts of the appeal of he argues that the feeling components of fear and, disgust are at and can be painful and If that is the the relevant than just the situations that elicit as Neill intrinsically unpleasant, so an account that traces the enjoyment of horror in the emotions it be to appeal to perceived our own experiences can be to the of this and thus make for the integrationist perspective that I want to In account of the argues that negative emotions, their feeling can be we our overall of our that is, we the to and the experience, so that the it not a Being in of our experience argues, to enjoy even unpleasant experiences a at a or we a in our or to be by stronger that be we can our to and we to horror fiction, we our experience, that is, we can to our or or put the the narrative For as as we this we are according to Morreall, to enjoy the negative emotions that the fiction in ways we not be to enjoy in response to real‐life on the effects of perceived our responses to at support to perceived seems to the associated with aversive it a to with pain, and makes a stronger he argues that us to enjoy the negative emotions that horror and not just to their painful If what he is that the is there are no that makes In this and if Carroll is that the feeling aspects of fear and disgust are and of the paradox is of according to for can why we are to experience emotional responses to art that we in real life, not a answer for why we want to experience such emotions at that they are I however, that why we want to experience the emotions that horror elicits. 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