1 Variants of the attraction paradox include: Why are individuals interested in horror? Why do they want to expose themselves to it? Why are they willing to pay money for this experience?

2 The pleasure paradox deals with the specific problem of how individuals can enjoy being horrified, and not with the more general issue—the paradox of fiction — of how anyone can be emotionally moved, pleasurably or otherwise, by something they know does not exist.

3 Many of these examples involve classic horrific motifs familiar to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the genre. Some of the arcane scenarios which may be more difficult to identify are taken from John Farris, Son of the Endless Night; Guy N. Smith, “The Baby”; Night of the Living Dead; The Evil Dead; and The Thing. Throughout this essay I follow the convention of citing films by title alone, and literary works by title and author.

4 Hutchings, Peter documents how British film critics have typically conceived of the horror audience as “completely Other, primitive, childlike … possibly in need of analysis” in Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 7.Google Scholar

5 According to The Guinness Book of Film Facts (1980) there are over 220 fulllength feature films based on Dracula and Frankenstein alone. Hardy, Phil, editor of The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1986)Google Scholar, lists over 1,300 films which had been produced as of 1985. This catalogue is now outdated and was far from complete at the time of composition. It contains few horror films of a science fiction bent, for example.

6 Twitchell, James B. offers evidence for this claim in Preposterous Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.105–6.Google Scholar

7 Carrol, Noel, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar. The paradox of horror is discussed in the final chapter of the book and, while Carroll does not explicitly distinguish between different versions of the paradox, the distinction I draw (for reasons which will become apparent) is implicit throughout his discussion. See especially p. 159. Throughout this essay I use the expression “the paradox of horror” to refer simultaneously to each of its two primitive forms. All page references in the body of this paper are to The Philosophy of Horror.

8 The paradox of horror is a perennial conundrum toyed with cursorily within many volumes of popular literature, and studied more systematically by literary theorists, film critics, psychoanalysts, and pundits of popular culture. However, few philosophers have been seriously interested in the problem. Phillip Hallie is one notable exception. Even so, his pioneering study, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, is concerned with a number of other large topics besides œthetic horror, and is dissimilar from Carroll's work with respect to its overall aim, scope, style, and methodology.

9 Since Carroll treats horror as a cross-media genre, I employ the phrase “horror fiction” broadly to include any aesthetic representation of horror, whether involving prose, poetry, drama, film, sculpture, painting, music, or any other aesthetic medium. Also following Carroll, I usually refer to the emotion of arthorror simply as “horror.”

10 Anyone not convinced of this claim ought to read Carroll's effective critique in chapter four of prevalent psychoanalytical and ideological explanations of the attraction of horror.

11 Undeniably, some horror fictions—films in particular—are so bad that virtually no one finds satisfaction in them, or would be attracted to them ab initio if they realized what they were in for. Furthermore, horror fans have very different tastes within the genre, and may be quite uninterested in particular sorts of horror fictions. Therefore, I think the comprehensiveness criterion must charitably be interpreted to rule out only those explanations that fail to account for the attraction, by some significantly large audience, of either a non-negligible number of mainstream horror fictions, an entire subgenre, or fictions presented within a particular aesthetic medium. Also, any proposal which does not apply to a distinctive segment of the horror audience—a specific age group or gender, say—fails to be appropriately comprehensive.

12 It would be unreasonable to insist that whatever accounts for the attraction of horror must never be found elsewhere. Minimally, however, the distinctive attraction of horror must not be definitive of, or play a major role in explaining the attraction of, any other genre. Carroll appears to believe that the latter restriction may be relaxed somewhat for closely related genres which share much the same audience. See his comments on the relation between horror and fantasy in general on p. 192.

13 None of which have, or are likely intended to have, universal validity. Jack, in Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, asserts that “We hate facing new facts or evidence, because we might have to revise our conceptions of what's possible, and that's uncomfortable.” Many non-fictional characters probably feel the same way.

14 It is worth noting that Carroll takes little notice of the fact that the contemporary horror audience is predominantly male, and it is not immediately clear whether his analysis can offer any credible explanation of this. It is presumably implausible to claim, in the absence of hard empirical evidence, either that females are generally less curious about conceptual anomalies or that they have a lower threshold of tolerance for the negative emotions associated with horror.

15 This story is anthologized in King, Stephen, Skeleton Crew (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 278–306.Google Scholar

16 In Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, James B. Twitchell poses a series of related questions about Stoker's Dracula, arguing that “this novel has the internal organization of a dream or a fairy tale” where “nothing important is ever really explained” (p. 126). On Twitchell's analysis, horror's “enduring motifs are all profoundly paradoxical” (p. 59). Rational explanation is not only beside the point; it fundamentally dilutes and debases horror. Quintessential horror monsters “cannot, and will not, and probably must not be understood by the consuming audience” (p. 59).

17 Surviving violent death involving severe physical disfigurement is of course a popular theme within horror.

18 To be sure, some of the informational gaps in “The Raft” could not be coherently addressed in the plot structure as King develops it. Given King's intention to suggest without actually depicting the narrator's death, for example, there is no plausible way to introduce information about the phenomenology of touching and being consumed by the monster. But this only underscores my point. Since King chose not to employ other literary techniques for coherently revealing monstrous properties to a much greater degree, such further revelations are not pivotal to the horrific aspect or appeal of the story.

19 Perhaps horror fans, like the readers of supermarket tabloids, receive a great deal of pleasure from even minuscule amounts of the right sort of information. Even so, it is difficult to understand why the genre does not further exploit this fact by generating even more pleasure with fuller disclosure. It is implausible to suggest, within the confines of the curiosity theory, that our curiosity in monsters is so easily satisfied or so finely tuned that exposure to more information tends to be unpleasant or otherwise counterproductive.

20 A more careful statement of this claim is that “The Raft” provides a typical amount of information about its monster, relative to its length, as compared with other prose narratives. Notice that two claims are implicit in this remark. First, longer (shorter) prose narratives will tend to disclose their monsters to a greater (lesser) extent. Second, film narratives tend to be less revealing than prose narratives since, despite the vivid detail of visual imagery, film is a fast paced medium providing less opportunity either to dwell on or to develop points of detail. This latter claim is certainly confirmed through a comparison of King's short story with its considerably less gripping cinematic representation in Creepshow II.

21 See W. W. Jacobs's classic, “The Monkey's Paw.”

22 In lieu of portraying the monster itself, one can of course focus on depicting the immediate consequences of its presence. Incubus and The Evil Dead are good examples of films which systematically abjure shots of the monster in favour of point-of-view depictions of the havoc it wreaks on its victims.

23 This story appears in many anthologies, including Hartwell, David G., ed., The Medusa in the Shield (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1987).Google Scholar

24 Since it is appropriate for the audience to be cued by Emily's reaction and to be horrified as well, I believe Carroll is mistaken to exclude the natural Gothic (pp. 4, 15) as well as certain horror-inducing forms of “fantastic” (in Todorov's sense) fiction (p. 145) from the horror genre proper.

25 King's novella, “The Mist,” which is over four times the length of “The Raft,” offers a much fuller physical description of its monsters, and of how they live and die. Still, no indication is given of their mental life or motivations, aside from the speculation about a couple of them being “stupid creatures.”

26 An interesting twist is provided by the innovative and highly influential ghost stories of M. R. James which typically provide unusually graphic physical descriptions of spirits but no psychological account of their motivations. “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” and “Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad” are particularly good examples of this.

27 This feature of the Frankenstein myth, of course, was jettisoned in the movies, wherein the monster normally appears as little more than a barely ambulatory, lonely, and verbally spasmodic quasi-human vegetable.

28 See H. P. Lovecraft's “The Outsider” and Richard Matheson's “Born of Man and Woman.” (It is worth noting that these are very short stories). There have, of course, been important recent developments in the direction of first-person monster narratives. See, for example, the phenomenally successful vampire novels of Anne Rice.

29 Brian Aldiss's parodic suggestion in “The Saliva Tree” that the rampaging pair of invisible, venomous monsters are on their honeymoon, and therefore only naturally would “like to eat well,” works so effectively, and is so funny, not because the idea is intrinsically ludicrous (it is not) but because speculations of this nature are wildly out of character with the genre's preoccupation with warlike depictions of hostile, mindless, unremitting struggles for supremacy and survival.

30 Carroll argues that our fascination with monsters can be traced to a cognitive interest in conceptual anomalies, violations of nature, and so on. There is no reason to restrict phenomena of this sort to the physical or biological sphere. Mental anomalies are possible as well.

31 There are, admittedly, also pleasures to be had from wondering whether monsters are about, and from attempting to resolve that issue one way or another. I will ignore these pleasures here since, though they likely contribute to the appeal of horror, they are not distinctive to (Carroll's understanding of) the genre.

32 The apparent tension between this view and Carroll's remark that “the disclosure of the existence of the horrific being and of its properties is the central source of pleasure in the genre” (p. 184) is resolved once it is recognized that the context of this sentence makes it clear that Carroll is employing the term “disclosure” liberally to encompass the entire process of attempting to gather information about monsters. Thus, monsters do indeed constitute the central source of pleasure within the genre, not in the crude sense that most of our most intense and memorable pleasures derive directly from actually learning something about monsters (“disclosure” narrowly construed); but in the logical sense that the pleasures of horror typically presuppose monsters. Without the background assumption of the (fictional) existence of some monster, horrific pleasures, on Carroll's view, are simply unavailable.

33 Joe R. Lansdale, author of Dead in the West and Savage Season, has remarked that “Any horror movie or book—even a good one—if you stop and think about the majority of 'em, the idea's stupid.” See Wiater, Stanley, Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 113.Google Scholar

34 The full text of the argument appears in Lucanio, Patrick, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

35 Although some of these examples are silly, the issues they raise are not. Consider, for example, recent philosophical debates concerning the riddle of induction, the interpretation of quantified modal logic, and the nature of argumentative fallacies.

36 One of my favourite examples is Professor Heitz's proclamation in The Gorgon that “I believe in the existence of everything which the human brain is unable to disprove.”

37 The one oblique reference which may be difficult to recognize comes from William Essex's Slime where the monster is destroyed by a drunk inadvertently urinating upon it.

38 Carroll is aware of this objection, but considers it not “totally damning” (p. 192). However, his reply that “it does not seem to me to be a problem for the theory advanced in this book that certain genres that obviously belong to the same family—such as supernatural or monster fantasies—all deliver comparable pleasures” (p. 192) either simply misses the point or effectively concedes the objection. It is precisely because these fantasies provide comparable pleasures at less cost that the curiosity theory fails to capture the distinctive attraction of horror while rendering the consumption of horror fictionprima facie unintelligible at the purely generic level of explanation. Though not necessarily a devastating problem for Carroll's theory, it is a problem nonetheless. The theory would be better off without it. (One also wonders how far Carroll might be willing to push this stratagem. Could one persuasively claim to have isolated the distinctive allure of, say, Westerns if comparable pleasures were available from any other action/adventure film?)

Carroll's additional response that “consumers of horror are most often consumers of other sorts of monster fantasies as well” (p. 192) is also unconvincing. Carroll backs this up with an example from the movies, and while it may be true that, owing to a fairly limited selection of fresh offerings at any one time, horror films and non-horror monster movies share largely the same audience, it is patently false that a comparable confluence occurs with respect to reading habits. Many dedicated readers of fantasy, children's literature, myths, legends and folk tales, and non-horrific science fiction refuse to touch horror fiction, and, conversely, many horror fans have only the slightest interest in these literary genres. In this connection, it is also worth considering one of the major presuppositions of Per Schelde's recent study, Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters (New York: New York University Press, 1993), to the effect that “sf movies and sf literature have little in common and appeal to very different audiences … Science fiction literature has a distinct and fairly limited audience—mostly consisting of intellectuals and science buffs” (p. 2). This underscores the possibility that many consumers of horror fiction may have little interest in the manner in which categorically aberrant monsters are represented in the literature of science fiction.

39 See Rockett, Will H., Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), for a systematic development of this theme.Google Scholar

40 A potentially troublesome feature of this theory, from Carroll's perspective, is that something very much like imaginative engagement is available from both “fantastic” fiction and certain naturalistic tales of terror which entertain, only to later dismiss actual horrific monstrosities. As noted earlier, Carroll argues that these fictions do not belong to the horror genre proper. The theory in question may therefore fail to capture the distinctive attraction of horror.

41 The standard narrative variation wherein the horrific monster “is not expelled or eliminated at the end of the story” (p. 201) does not constitute a counterexample to this claim. Horror monsters ought to be destroyed, although they occasionally escape this fate, prosper, and, as in Rosemary's Baby or The Legacy, may even become the perverse object of the human protagonist's love.

42 Of course, monsters are often the product of torture and experimentation (Frankenstein, Donovan's Brain, The Island of Dr. Moreau) who are then generally discarded or set free to do their master's bidding. Incarceration, whenit occurs (King Kong, Gorgo), is generally a transitory state and not the creature's ultimate telos. (Cat People [1982] is an interesting exception.) When the devil finally receives psychiatric treatment, it occurs in the non-horror film Mr Frost.

43 Carroll also notes that “Monsters and their projects in horror fictions are irredeemably evil” (p. 139). Talk of the monster's destruction, and of the propriety of confronting evil in this manner, permeates his discussion in chapter three of characteristic horror plots and their use of suspense. Oddly, the notions of evil and destruction do not play a significant role in Carroll's account of either the nature or the paradox of horror.

44 A major shortcoming of Carroll's analysis, since humans cannot be monsters, is that it is logically impossible to be horrified at (some aspect of) oneself. At best, observations of ourselves can precipitate a reaction of horror to some other creature, currently not countenanced by science.

45 Again, Carroll concedes without developing the point that “Horror fictions perennially gravitate toward violence” (p. 211).

46 We are “harmed” by the monster in the most general sense that its presence or activity invariably makes us worse off.

47 See Wood, Robin, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Grant, Barry Keith, ed., Planks of Reason (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 164–200Google Scholar, and Kawin, Bruce, “Children of the Light,” in Grant, Barry Keith, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) pp. 236–57.Google Scholar

48 In addition, granting that we regularly derive certain distinctive pleasures from the consumption of horror fiction fails even to begin to address the more relevant and most interesting questions as to why these experiences are pleasurable in the first place, and why individuals so actively pursue these pleasures when countless others are available. Consider an analogy with sex. To say humans engage in sex because it is pleasurable is facile. What needs to be explained is why we find sex (so) pleasurable, and why we forego other pleasures in its pursuit.

49 I thank the members of the Carleton University Philosophy Department for their comments on an early draft of this paper, read in the spring of 1992.