Horror Fiction, Horror Films: No Maps, No Borders? Or Aesthetic Fundamentalism?

Aesthetic fundamentalism: the idea that certain forms of writing or filmmaking must be restricted to a limited range of elements and methods.

This becomes odd when applied to any field unlimited by tradition, any field that can absorb variations and hybrids without end, while remaining characteristically itself. For example, horror.

Horror is not a genre, limited by expectations or styles, but a mood, an emotional or intellectual response that can be prompted by any number of ideas and approaches. This refusal to be limited means that readers and viewers of horror can form their own aesthetic preferences.

An aesthetic preference is harmless, even useful, as long as we recognize that it reveals more about ourselves, about our own wants and needs, than it does about the field as a whole. For my part, I find more of what I love about horror in the writings of Thomas de Quincey or Walter de la Mare, in Elizabeth Bowen or William Sansom, than I have ever found in Lovecraft. I find more uncanny atmosphere in a non-horror book like L. P. Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, than in anything I've read or tried to read by Stephen King; more dread and strangeness in the films of Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Lynch, than in films from Roger Corman or Hammer. Yet I recognize that for many people, King and Lovecraft, Hammer and Corman are what horror means. Their preferences, and mine, are neither wrong nor right, but merely personal and subjective.

Yet I still meet opposition to this idea that aesthetic assessments are subjective -- inevitably subjective, given the size of the field, the sheer number of books and films available over the decades and centuries, the wide range of plots and images, tones evoked and methods applied; no single aesthetic preference could cover so much varied material.

I find this opposition all the more baffling because, for me, a great attraction of horror is the lack of maps, the open borders, the endless possibilities for personal expression and personal satisfaction. Its freedom from genre expectations gives horror the advantage of surprise; it can be found in the least expected places, as in the stories of Isaac Babel or John Cheever, as in a down-to-Earth, slice-of-life book like Sarah Orne Jewett's THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS. As a reader, as a watcher of movies, I take pleasure in being caught off guard, in finding the unexpected in the most unlikely stories and films.

Others disagree. They seem to want the expected, the usual. I have heard some people argue that for many readers and viewers, horror is comfortable, familiar, reassuring in its repeated elements and methods, but I find this hard to believe, if only because horror, by the extremity of its emotional impact, seems more likely to shock and unsettle than to comfort. Yet the repetitions, the rituals of Dracula and Cthulhu, Freddy Krueger and Jason, have always been more popular than LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, PERSONA, SECONDS, or FAIL SAFE. There would seem to be a pattern, here, of preferences in horror, of old things desired, of novelties avoided.

In the end, patterns count for less than personal tastes. Horror provides a field wide enough for everyone. Whether we choose to explore its length, or to sit quietly in one place, or to build fortresses and borders within this infinite realm, we choose for purposes that suit our own needs. The field itself goes on and on.