I’ve been messing around in digital art.  I’ve got to say, those wacky bright colors really take the cake.  

I still look like I’m in a great deal of pain.  I’m not.

Because my video exceeds the maximum size.

Hanscomb narrows down art-horror to provoking three emotions: anxiety, fear, and disgust (Hanscomb page 18, paragraph2).  Anxiety and fear are the factors of the unknown.  With this equation he points out mysticism and “monotheistic religious existentialists.”  An example that uses fear, anxiety, disgust, and the unknown is Reagan in The Exorcist (1973) and how religious sayings and artifacts were the only way to cure the disgusting possession.  That treatment puts things into perspective.  If in the story, those old-timey treatments can work, it subliminally makes us think about ourselves.  There is so much we don’t know and can’t answer.  This thought and looking at ourselves from a third person point of view makes us think of a bigger picture, one that relates to existentialism.  It’s ourselves in place and time.  And as far as nauseous elements go, Hanscomb quotes, “Things become monstrous – rather than merely, say, hazardous or dangerous in the everyday sense – because they reach beyond the routine and functional boundaries of everydayness” (Hanscomb page 7, paragraph 2). Overflowing trash cans and falling tree branches can respectively be gross and scary, but they don’t haunt or nauseate us like a bucket of organs or a homicidal psychopath on the loose do.  Those last two examples aren’t common, and we haven’t built up an immunity to them (building up a tolerance is another aspect of existentialism).  We’ve adapted to accepting certain things to become normal to us.  There isn’t an unknown aspect and the gross factor has been scaled down significantly regarding trash and falling branches.  You see, these emotions are like elements or parts of equations.  Fear and anxiety create the unknown.  The unknown, coupled with disgust, could be murky water, fog, or blob creatures.  Depending on which emotions are activated, we feel differently about certain stories.  The bucket or organs is disgust and fear combined.  That fear is what separates everyday disgust from art-horror nausea.  The psychopath is fear, anxiety, and the unknown.  Like in The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (Swiss,1741-1825 oil on canvas version 2 circa 1790-91) you see a strange little goblin creature sitting on a sleeping woman’s chest.  There is unknown and fear in this.  Relating pretty closely to The Nightmare is Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House (1933) where, among many other horrifying experiences, the protagonist is sometimes visited by a terrifying rat-man creature at night.  Now, this whole situation works well with all the points so far.  The rat, Brown Jenkin, is interstitial, unknown and draws out many mixed emotions, and could possibly be a symbol for a number of things such as the house itself, witchcraft, or fear of the dark.   Stories provoke different emotions, horror not being an exception.  These emotions are different, and are often viewed as negative (like fear, sadness, disgust, and anxiety), but that’s the reason we’re drawn to this genre. And that’s Katerina Batinaki’s point she tries to send home with you.

And the final point is how you, or anyone else, would react in a certain situation.  Existentialism is like viewing your life from a 3^rd person point of view.  You think about how and why you would react in certain situations, which character or archetype you are and how you became that way based on previous life experiences.  “Further research could usefully assess the possibility that horror plays a transitional role in the Western individual’s existential development, and in particular the movement towards disenchantment,” (Hanscomb, page 18, paragraph 5) mentioned Hanscomb while trying to explain the paradox or horror.  We react to situations differently now than we did as children.  We no longer rely on fairytales as explanations for why things are.  We try using more reason and science.  But when reason and science get sketchy, fear comes back. We think we have conquered nature and the dark, but when something comes along and threatens what we think we have control over, we look at ourselves as characters in the story of the world and realize we’re just tiny individual people, and even a group of people may not be enough to stop whatever is threatening to take back what we thought we owned.  We fear the woods again in The Witch (2016) by Robert Eggers, we fear children in The Exorcist, and the dark and houses in general in Dreams in the Witch House.  Really in art-horror, nowhere and nothing is safe.  As we are exposed to more and more scary scenarios, our fear matures as we do.  We don’t fear the toilet eating us when being potty-trained because that’s ridiculous.  But you know what isn’t ridiculous?  Being possessed.  It can happen to anyone at any time!  As a kid we didn’t know anything about that sort of thing.  But fear is relative and varies from person to person.  It’s kind of a living thing (and it’s often portrayed in that way in any horror story).  And there are different types of terror.  Some movies use jump scares, which anyone can be scared by because they take us off guard, but usually that fear we have lasts only for a short time.  The kind of fear that sticks around is more pathological.  It haunts us, much like in It Follows.  We know we aren’t safe, and that fear can destroy us.  But if you get existential about it, what are the odds that a demon will possess you?  What would the demon even want from you and why you out of anyone else?  Even if the scenario isn’t likely, the thought of it actually playing out is enough for most people to be spooked.  And that’s what art-horror really is.

The paradox of horror may never truly be answered, but through existentialism and research we can come closer to a better answer.  The more points to be connected and the more contradicting opinions we can gather, the better.  Viewing ourselves and our species as a whole truly is existential, but will an accurate summary ever be achieved?  Hanscomb uses many examples throughout Existentialism in Art-Horror, and this kind of evidence gathering and higher thinking are the best way (so far) an understanding our fascination to horror.

A very interesting subject that ties existentialism and art-horror together and is a good beginner for the analysis is monster symbolism.  “Embedded in a graphic narrative and with their very particular form of grotesque threat, horror monsters engage us emotionally, but in a way that serves as a symbol. Like Sartre’s slime, they represent the division between major ontological categories, and eventually the anxious nature of the for-itself,” as Hanscomb puts it (Hanscomb, pg 18, paragraph 4).  Especially monsters derived from normal humans like the cave-dwelling cannibalistic people in Neil Marshall’s movie The Descent (2006), put our being into perspective.  We can all become cannibals given a tough enough situation.  The only thing separating us from the subterranean humanoid throat-eaters is our will.  Hanscomb (and H.P. Lovecraft in The Outsider) explains monsters are in the eye of the beholder, we determine what is scary and what is not.  The monsters that scare us aren’t foreign enough, they aren’t an omnipotent gas that destroys all humanity. The monsters he talks about here represent blood and organs (“The Blob”), humans, and emotions.  Monsters have qualities we can relate to.  But these qualities don’t have to be things we can actually touch.  In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), the monster is in incarnation of STDs, transmitted between people having intercourse and haunts the current possessor of the curse.  This monster symbolizes our fear of sexually transmitted diseases and how no matter how hard you try, you can’t really lose it. The disease will haunt you.  It’s a fear everyone has, but turned into a physical being.  Hanscomb goes even further into monster-creating and symbolism as he talks about the impurity of monsters and abominations this paper will summarize next.

The art-horror genre is filled with monsters stuck between two worlds.  Zombies are both dead and alive, wolf, fly, and goat people are stuck between the animal world and the human one ,and sewer-dwelling mutants are outcasts by our standards, so they banish themselves to a world where nobody will see them.  “…[c]reatures which hang around borders, and disrespect their integrity are traditionally described as monsters. They comprise a species of sinister miscreants exiled from the normative categories of the established system. A species of non-species, as it were. Alien monsters represent the ‘unthought’ of any given point of knowledge and representation, the unfamiliar spectre which returns to haunt the secure citadel of consciousness,” quotes Timothy Beal (whom Hanscomb cites on page 3, paragraph 2). H.P. Lovecraft demonstrates this remarkably in The Thing on the Doorstep (1937).  Derby, a friend of the protagonist, has had his body taken over by a mind-controlling succubus-like demon and desperately tries to stop her once he realizes her true power.  He comes to the door of his friend as an oozing, deformed mess.  He is impure.  The possession and imagery also contribute to another point Hanscomb talks about regarding existentialism, so make sure to keep this story in the back of your mind for later. Another interstitial idea is bringing a dead body back to life.  If the person was revived correctly, it’s a happy ending, but horror stories don’t take too kindly to happy endings.  In H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West-Reanimator (1922) the people brought back to life aren’t themselves, the serum Dr. West uses isn’t perfected, and we get sub-humans who scream and run into houses and kill people.  “It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance” (Lovecraft).  Even just losing part of humanity, like what many real diseases do today, is chilling.  We expect a person or animal to act a certain way, but when they diverge from the norm, we’re uncomfortable.  In fact, if you don’t mind me taking a little detour, I was watching an episode of Axe Cop just last night and there was a rabbit who broke all the rabbit rules.  Instead of hopping and eating carrots, it walked around and ate a coconut. Now, that doesn’t seem scary, but for it being interstitial, I felt uneasy seeing it walk around on screen.  It still acted like a rabbit, it didn’t start talking or pull out a watch or anything. It was just a strange rabbit.  Now, this rabbit isn’t as scary as reanimated corpses eating people, but fear works on many different levels of severity, even if it’s not something that haunts us.  The interstitial creatures fall into the “Uncanny Valley” where they aren’t one thing or another.  Uncanny Valley residents just make us feel uneasy, even if they are good-hearted like the walking rabbit or evil like mutated man-eating outcasts.  We view ourselves in one category, animals in another, and dead bodies in a third category.  There are more categories than these three, but when the categories start getting fuzzy and we don’t know where something belongs, that’s when interstitial fear starts to kick in.  But in order to create a terrifying monster, there needs to be elements of mystery to it.  The more information we have about a subject, the easier it is to accept it into our lives and deal with it sensibly.  But when we don’t know how to kill a monster, what an alien wants, or why the ghosts haunt us, the harder it is to feel safe around them.  This element of unpleasant mystery can lead to curiosity, which can begin to lead us into solving the paradox of horror.  This sense of mystery and fear leads us to Hanscomb’s third point, emotional reactions to horror.

Why do we seek out horror movies, stories, and art to scare ourselves?  Is it our own curiosity or a need for feeling diverse emotions that drive us towards fear?  Stuart Hanscomb attempts to answer not only those questions, but also how existentialism, disgust, monsters, and more ideas contribute to our consumption of the horror genre in his title Existentialism and Art-Horror (published 2010).  Hanscomb tries to answer what Katerina Batinaki later deemed The Paradox of Horror (published 2012) and other aspects of horror Noël Carrol touches on in The Nature of Horror (published 1987).  Using these three crucial papers and various examples in the form of short stories and movies, this analysis should give the reader a better summary of these papers and the questions they try to answer.  To be a proper summary, the outline will be simplified into four compressed points.  In this paper you’ll learn about monsters and the symbolism they have in art-horror.  Monsters can represent certain fears humanity as a whole has.  But monsters can represent political views, people, ideas, and diseases.  Interstitial monsters, another reoccurring theme, are very prevalent throughout most horror stories and horror analysis.  There’s a niche of creatures that scare us the most when they aren’t exactly human or too far-fetched to exist.  It all ties in to the uncanny valley, and many authors exploit this common fear all the time.  Emotions, as one would expect, have a lot riding on them to carry out a truly terrifying feeling.  The main emotions evoked when viewing art-horror are fear (duh), anxiety, and disgust.  They can be combined to make us feel differently and broken down into very basic terms.  You can’t have a good story without inciting emotions, and horror is no exception to this.  The final piece that will be covered in this outline will be our human responses to horror predicaments.  In other words, how we react in or reading about situations that are frightening.  They can be jump scares like those used in a variety of video games and movies or more psychological horrors.  Psychological horrors being monsters or ideas that haunt us give us a constant state of fear.  The big four points presented just briefly here will be elaborated in this analysis paper, but even from the few sentences I hope you are able to see their power in art-horror already.  They’ll be used to answer the hook questions and explain the existentialism of art-horror.

A photoshop project. I’m just testing out the site and decided to share my creation.