What is "horror" anyway?

3/19/2011

2 Comments

 
Without meaning to sound too cheesy on the subject, I was trying to come up with a workable definition of "horror". 
I mean some people think that any thing with gore equals horror.  But to me, that's just shock value not really horror.
Is horror anything that deliberately scares you?  If that's the case, then John Boehner is the king of horror!  (Sorry, I will try to keep politics out of this.) Let me know what you think...
2 Comments
Laurie link
6/23/2011 11:50:44 pm

I agree, for me John Boehner is very scary! Gore & guts is certainly gross but for me horror is worse when there is the psychological element as well as the physical sense of doom.
Laurie
<a href="http://lauriethoughts-reviews.blogspot.com">Laurie's Thoughts & Reviews</a>

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Oliver Richmond link
5/13/2016 10:27:17 pm

It's hard to define, really.

The thing about horror is that people are affected by things differently. I feel like as we age as a society, the more we learn, the more of the world around us we uncover and come to understand, we have less to fear. You can still achieve horror but one of the biggest aspects is tackling the unknown, or 'other'. Not knowing something or not understanding tends to be one of the biggest causes of fears for humans, I feel like, so if you can touch on that it helps achieve that result.

A problem specific to COMICS is that big elements that help horror are ambience, and while you can achieve ambience in comics it's a lot more difficult with just visuals. Sounds, music, lighting, all these things work together to trigger unease and discomfort for people. If people are reading a horror comic in public, or in a house with other people, or with music playing it can do a lot to diminish the affect, so the challenge of actually getting people to read horror comics and appreciate them is pretty high.

I think rather than horror here we have comics with tension, comics that, while they might not scare the READER, they might make the reader fear for the characters they love, which I think is absolutely attainable with comics but that's more 'thriller' territory.

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