Sunday, July 15, 2018

Five Types of Fear (A Theory of Horror):

1. Worry: fear for a sympathetic character the reader/audience identifies with, e.g. a rookie female cop, in a misguided attempt to prove herself, enters a warehouse alone with only her flashlight and gets trapped inside by a homicidal cult. 

2. Revulsion: discomfort and desire to avoid disgusting or upsetting content, like rape or intensive gore, e.g. a large man captures and ties a little girl to a table and performs surgery on her eyes.

3. Shock: surprise at a sudden, unexpected occurrence or twist, e.g. a party looking for a missing woman finds nothing unusual or out of place in her house, when one member casually opens a closet door and out onto her tumbles a desiccated corpse.

4. Dread: general misery and anxiety about the fallen, hopeless state or the unchecked dangers of a world that could already be or could soon become our own, e.g. public executions are broadcast on billboard-sized screens around a city where all speech is monitored for “moral offenses.”

5. Terror: fear of a phenomenon or agency that is real or believed to be real and that represents a present mortal danger to the reader/audience (usually only viscerally effective with the more credulous, such as children), e.g. LOCK YOUR DOOR! THEY ARE COMING TO GET YOU!